They left. Someone brought a basin of water, food, a towel. In an hour or so, one of the men came back. He beckoned. I followed. Pitch-black and I could scarcely see. I fell asleep in the car—and was awakened at my own gate.
The next morning a new car sat outside my gate.
127
No matter which way I turn—blocked. A vise. I’m jammed in. Unfree. Getting frantic. No power in myself. No greater power to whom I can turn. No power to think. Not enough power to feel better. A time to listen. For instinct’s voice.
I was down to that bedrock.
Although they followed me everywhere for weeks and weeks, I knew that I could shake them off on the back roads of the countryside. It took me that long, anyway, to think through the gamble I had in mind. I was wagering on the past, looking to myth, seeking lessons in legend.
You see how my mind had begun to work? You see how myth and its principles had worked in me? Any other man might have considered the stories that John Jacob O’Neill had told me no more than legend. Interestingly coincidental. Slightly magical. My configuration, though, and my daily intake of tales had led me to think otherwise. I trusted in them as I trusted in maps. Was there a risk that I might see things that weren’t there? Not at all.
I didn’t send him a telegram. That could have been traced. It didn’t matter. This time John Jacob had a warmer welcome, if that were possible.
He said, “But you can drop in anytime.”
“Intruding always concerns me.”
“You don’t know how to intrude,” he said. “That’s part of your problem.”
We sat outdoors, on his garden bench. Afraid to ask for help or guidance, I tried to frame a question—about the general principle of myth as teacher. No need; without comment or introduction, he began to speak; he gave no reason.
This is a Persian story. A woman from the mountains came down one day onto the plain to visit her married sister. She looked haggard and broken. Her sister took her to see a wizard who lived on the edge of town.
When the sister had gone, the wizard said to the haggard woman, “You have two men desiring you, am I right?”
The haggard woman said, “You’re right.”
The wizard said, “And you don’t know what to do, and they’re both violent men, am I right?”
The haggard woman said, “You’re right.”
The wizard said, “And either man might kill you if you go with the other, am I right?”
The haggard woman said, “You’re right.”
The wizard said, “Well, I have powers greater than either of those two men, and I will use those powers on your behalf.”
He knelt on the ground, and, as the woman watched, he drew two circles in the dirt as a child might draw a pair of primitive eyes. He stood up and he did a little dance in which his feet erased the first circle. A wind came whipping in, and with it came rain, sharp as knives. In five seconds the wind and rain went away and the sun shone.
With his feet in another little dance, the wizard erased the second circle. This time, a new wind came whipping in, carrying snow, huge and soft. In five seconds it had gone away, and the sun shone. The wizard stood with his head bowed, and as far as the haggard woman could see, he was muttering some incantation.
Then he turned to her and said, “I have done this for you because you are a good woman and I know that. Go back to your mountain. Be safe. You will never see either of those men again.”
And that’s the story of the haggard woman.
I didn’t stay much longer. John Jacob seemed especially fatigued. With his great courtesy, he declined my invitation to eat at a nearby hotel.
This time, no car waited for me at the top of his lane. Nobody knew where I was.
Within days I identified my wizard. Three days later, after a long drive, I called on him, unannounced. I didn’t know him, and he didn’t know me: perfect.
He had much to say. A learned man. And lonely. He wore darkish glasses indoors, as though light hurt him. On his feet he wore striped red-and-green socks that looked like slippers, and he peeled them back to show me his corns and bunions.
“Can you imagine,” he said, and it was a genuine question, “how difficult is my journey through life on these feet?”
I nodded in sympathy. “Have you seen anybody for them?”
“There’s a chiropodist in Ballylooby, but she always puts her hand on my knee, and to tell you the truth, I’d prefer that she didn’t. She has a very handsome husband.”
Within a short time it became clear that he didn’t subscribe to the sequential rules of conversation.
“What’s it like to be tall?” he asked me. “I’ve been five feet two and a quarter inches high since I was seventeen, and I’m sick of it. The shoes don’t help. Would you inspect them and tell me what you think, a big, good-looking man like you?”
He contorted, reached under his chair (from which his feet didn’t touch the carpet), and pulled out a pair of shiny, buttoned boots. They had lifts built onto the soles and heels.
I turned them over in my hands—a child’s shoes with wooden platforms. “Isn’t this what’s hurting your feet?”
“Oh, I have urine problems, too. And I’ve done a translation of the Apocrypha. Full of bloody heresy. Do you understand this fellow Einstein? I think he gets a lot of things wrong. Are you a chess player at all? No? Pity. But you read, don’t you, you have the eyes of a reader, haven’t you? I was looking at Kipling this morning—imperialist old bugger but a good poet.” He began a quotation: “You can go where you please, you can skid up the trees—”
I finished it for him: “But you don’t get away from the guns.”
Thank you, Harry MacCarthy, for your love of Rudyard Kipling, and for passing it on to me.
Thus did my wizard warm to me. I had scored high on his tests—not shocked by feet or bladders, or possible mathematical genius, and well-read.
He was an ambitious man, hence my choosing him, and he went on to fulfill his drive. At that time, though, he’d been content to advise those higher than him: his local bishop, his archbishop, the cardinal in Armagh. Since they knew him to be clever above their reach, and shrewd beyond what his personality suggested, they had no difficulty accepting what he suggested. And he even did a two-year stint in the Vatican, where they prize shrewdness above sanctity.
He saw my strategy. In an instant. He might even have seen the innate hypocrisy of it, the end justifying the means. But he nodded.
“Good boy, good boy.”
I don’t think he believed me—but he recognized a sly thought process when he saw one. When I asked him his opinion, he nodded slowly. Thought some more. Then blinked.
“I suppose you know that I have a major building project under way; a smart man like yourself would have figured out that it needs donations. For the greater glory of Almighty God, of course.”
“Of course,” I said.
Here’s what I told him: I could deal with the gunmen. Their ire would cool, they had other problems, and they owed me favors, because I had rescued one of them from a life threat. But I had no way of handling the forces of government, who chose to misinterpret me. They had disrupted my reuniting with my wife, who had been through an American divorce and remarried. I had persuaded her to leave that man, on the grounds that we didn’t, in Ireland, recognize divorce. We had meant it when we said, “Till death us do part.”
Canon Sheridan bought the story. Or at least he entered the deal. He warned me that it would take some weeks:
“Big wheels move slowly. But we know a lot of things about people in power.”
A month later, on a fine morning, while one car sat outside my house, another arrived. They conferred, the men in the cheap suits. When they left, one after the other, I knew that they had gone forever.
We met, my wizard and I, many years later, when the canon had become a bishop. After our first greeting he whispered to me, “Wasn’t that good business we did?”
I said, “God
has the power.”
“I prayed hard,” he said.
“Did you also rub out circles on the ground?” I asked him and, when I saw his bemused look, added, “I’ll tell you someday.”
128
So there I sat, on my hillside, overlooking the sea, exactly where I am now. I was in my midforties, and much of my life had closed down. Miss Fay had recovered, but she remained frail, and I saw her often. Sometimes she, Marian Killeen, and I went to a concert, or to dinner, or merely for a slow walk along the shore.
My parents flourished, though in a quieter way, and seemed to draw ever closer. I became obsessive about my house and, once the essential repairs were completed, embarked on a full, authentic restoration. I hired an architect who understood what I sought, and I lived the work, moment by moment, doing most of it myself.
Except the plastering. The architect found a genius. Plasterers have a reputation for lunacy. This man, Liam Jenkins, told me that he didn’t want me near the house while he was there.
“But I live here.”
“You’ll have to go somewhere else.”
“Any reason why?”
Liam Jenkins said, “I work naked. That’s why.”
He got his way, and I got my walls—to a perfect standard.
“Where did you learn your trade?” I asked him one evening over a drink.
“I’m an accountant by training. And one day I asked myself, ‘Is there any skill I admire more than any other in the world, and how would it benefit my country if I had it?’ So I set out to become the best plasterer that anybody ever knew.”
In the months it took to finish the house, his remark haunted me. I finished the plumbing, the electrical wiring, the flooring, the tiling, the painting, the wallpapering. Every room allowed me to take it up to a pristine state. I had been sleeping in a camp bed, in the smallest room—as close as I could get to replicating a prison cell. Now I retrieved from the warehouse in Cashel my own possessions, and those that Mother had passed on to me. They and the house seemed made for each other. I had to buy so little.
As my last job, I built a locked cabinet of aged fruitwood for James’s notebooks. I astonished myself—I made marquetry inlays, cut in fine detail and feather-thin stripes. This took the longest of all, and as I worked I interrupted myself to read from the notebooks I was protecting—James’s wisdom, snatches of verse, stories, cures, recipes, and quotations.
Came the day that I had no more work left to do. And could drum up none: every path, every pillar and post, every pocket of grass had been renewed. I had little facing me except to sit and look at my beautifully plastered walls. And think. And reflect. And mourn the loss of my inner decency. And seek a recovery—of any kind.
Is there any skill I admire more than any other in the world, and how would it benefit my country if I had it?
129
Please understand, Ben and Louise, that nothing romantic hung from my next decision. I had always leaned this way; I didn’t necessarily know that about myself—but at that moment I saw it. Hence my fascination with James; and with the hundreds of men and women, of all ages, by their firesides; and with the generations gone before them, back to the time of the bards. And hence my living obsession with John Jacob O’Neill.
He replied to my careful letter (it took me a week to draft) with two words on a postcard: “At last.” When I visited him, I assessed what he needed; a second visit set us up.
Here is the plan we made: I would apprentice myself to him as a storyteller, he would teach me everything he knew, and I would memorize all the stories he had in his head—or was prepared to tell me. I agreed without hesitation to meet his three conditions.
One: Nothing would be written down. “Back to the old days,” he said. “The druids, the bards—they kept everything in their memories.”
Two: I would see it as a true apprenticeship, with all the discipline involved. During my training I would spend as much time with him as I could.
And three: With me in tow, he might, he said, take to the road for one last week, as though traveling in the old days. I did persuade him to the concession that he would allow me to drive him.
130
We worked together for two years. On Monday mornings I left my house at seven o’clock and drove the long journey down the four seasons of roads. He’d insisted upon what he called “office hours”—from half past nine to six o’clock, with an hour for lunch. I made sure to dress as elegantly as I could, though never in anything other than a black suit, a white shirt, and a black tie.
In the first month, I loaded my daily clothes into the closet in my room. He inspected everything, asked to see my boot polish and brushes, my shaving kit. To my socks he paid especial attention, and made me change the kind I wore. We didn’t have a vast range available to us in Ireland, but he made me buy pairs with more cushioning, of a wool less coarse.
He next put me through, in effect, a job interview. His focus centered on what he called “My own private three R’s: rising, recreation, and retiring.” And he dismissed—in his usual kindly way—my habits.
“Rise at precisely the same time every morning. Rest for at least three hours every day—one to include lunch, two around an evening meal. Retire at precisely the same time every night. And I mean retire to sleep. Allow for half an hour or so to read or to make tomorrow’s lists. But make sure that you close your eyes at the same hour of the clock seven nights a week.”
I asked him, “Why is the precision so important?”
“It will reduce your anxiety,” he said. “You of all people.”
“Does it show?”
“Takes one to know one,” he replied. “I was so anxious that I had to travel the world.”
“Were you easily frightened?”
“My own shadow startled me. Or a sudden cry from a bird.”
And so my training began. Before we reached into the area of his famous narrative expertise, he said he wanted to talk about scheduling. “How did you plot your journey around the country?”
I said, “I didn’t have a plan. Either I went where the wind blew me or I followed up contacts the Folklore Commission wanted me to pursue.”
He shook his head. “You should have had a system. We can do nothing without systems,” he told me, and he went on to describe his methods:
“I’d start in a town, any town, by the ocean. From there I’d travel all around the coast. Then I’d work my way inland by about ten miles or so and begin a second circle. And so on, and so on, until the circles became tighter and tighter by ten miles at a time, and I’d end up on the banks of the Shannon at Athlone, in the middle of the country. I called them my ‘ring roads.’ ”
“Did you ever keep count of the distances you walked?”
“I used to think that miles traveled amounted to some kind of feat. And I suppose you could say that was true. I changed, though, and measured myself by how few places I visited. Because that meant that they liked my stories and didn’t find me too bad.”
We may think that we scrutinize our parents while growing up. And I know that I did. I could tell when either of them hit a bad-tempered patch, or grew excited, or morose. Easy enough with my father, whose face was a movie screen. Mother, though, tended to hide her feelings—until she couldn’t, and then they became a lightning storm, flashing and crashing.
Never, though, not even with Venetia, have I focused on another human being as in those two years with John Jacob O’Neill. I watched everything he did, every gesture he made, every step he took. Now I can see that I was relearning life. Having not only failed at everything I had done but traveled to the very underworld of baseness and vile deed, I needed a lifeline. At the time I wouldn’t have couched it like that; looking back, I can see it clear as day.
Was I tempted at all to confide in him? Of course I was. There were moments in almost every day when I felt the words of confession lingering behind my teeth. Why didn’t they pour out? He stopped them. Not by anything he did or said but
by his own simple being.
He had a reserve about him, a distance he could put between himself and the world. Nothing splashed him. Sudden and difficult moments didn’t come his way. The humdrum pressings we all experience never wrinkled the fabric of his life. Not once in those two years with him—and never thereafter—did I see him having to deal with a difficulty.
How did he do it? How did he manage his world so well? It didn’t look like control. He didn’t chide people or challenge them. Things didn’t go wrong—or so it seemed. His electricity bill arrived the first week I was there, claiming an amount eight times his annual costs. He wrote the agency a calm letter, enclosing a check for the same amount as the last bill, and asked if someone would look into it. The fish truck arrived one day with no fish. He joked with the man, and never asked him—in justifiable irritation—why he’d bothered to call with an empty van.
You must remember that I had never seen such a steady human being. My father, Harry, brought turmoil into every corner of his life. Mother dashed close behind him, putting out his fires. James Clare, with whom I had traveled a little, fought a rearguard action against his own lungs. Miss Fay tidied everything around herself—all the time.
And I? What was I like? I didn’t know. Had you asked me, when you first met me, to describe myself and how I conducted my life—I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. From John Jacob O’Neill, though, I learned that I had no life system worth anything.
He found only one part of my work ethic that he could applaud. (Not that he decried me: not once did he criticize me.) He admired only the neatness of my car interior and my briefcase and notebooks.
“If you were a tradesman,” he said to me, “I can tell that you’d have all your tools in neat rows on the wall.”
I still bask in that.
In short, he rebuilt me. Within days I had adopted his regime—not that I had a choice. I rose precisely, came to breakfast at exactly half past eight, took my hour and my two-hour breaks to the minute, went to sleep at the same time every night. And slept—which surprised me.