Nobody dared suggest anything—I mean, who would tell a king what to do? Until he came to a woman he thought he recognized. He didn’t know her—but her face was familiar because it was her daughter who had led the children to the palace.
He asked her, too, “Is there anything else I can do?” and she said, in the forthright way that her daughter had learned, “Yes, there is, sire.” The king looked at her and waited. “Come and live with me and my family for a few days, and you will understand your kingdom better, and your people will love you more.”
The king took a pace back. He looked all around Palace Hill. Word of what the woman had asked went whispering through the crowd. They fell silent—so silent that you could hear the swallows chittering in the eaves overhead, so silent that you could hear the wind in the grass, so silent that you could hear the stream that gurgled down Palace Hill to the river in the valley.
As they waited, the king frowned. They knew what was going through his mind: would this be royal behavior? And still the rain poured down. It plastered his hair to his forehead. It drenched his royal robes. It ran down the faces of the people who looked at him, the woman and her daughter, and the children around them; everywhere the king looked he saw wet, expectant faces.
He spoke. “That is a most gracious invitation,” he said. “And I am happy to accept.”
For the next seven days the king lived in that woman’s house with her husband and her children. They had one room, divided for sleeping arrangements by a rope hanging an old sheet. He ate their pitiably little food, he washed his face in the water they—or he—brought from a stream. He walked at their pace, he spoke in their tempo, and he looked at every wonder to which the children pointed. They all found him to be a most agreeable companion.
On the eighth morning, he stepped from their house, into the pouring rain. As he turned to say, “Goodbye and thank you,” the rain stopped. As suddenly and definitely as if somebody up in the heavens had turned it off. The king had atoned. And never was there such prosperity on that island as in the following years.
141
I finished my tale, took in the wide-eyed silence of the children and the pleased smiles of the adults. They asked me where I had first heard it, and I told them that an old lady told it and many more on an island in a lake near Enniskillen. Afterward, they offered me a bed for the night, but I declined. I had other plans; I would begin to make the tale I had told come true.
I only had to make a short journey. Outside the village, travelers had camped. They had a horse-drawn caravan painted in the usual bright colors, and a couple of ponies grazing while tethered to the van. A fire glowed, neither high nor bright. Earlier, driving past, I had seen an elderly man and woman. Their ages I could not tell.
Though it was near midnight, they hadn’t yet gone to bed, wherever that was. She sat on the step of the wagon, he by the fire, smoking a cigarette and crooning to himself.
You’ll have seen, children, groups like these, usually larger, with children and extended families, and maybe a dog or two and a donkey or a mule. They suffered from us—we were what they called “the settled people,” who lived in houses. The believed us to be bullies, we believed them to be thieves, and I know that much of our demonizing of them had to do with the fact that we treated them so badly.
Although they were supposed to have descended from our dispossessed chieftains, people all over the country moved them on with sticks and kicks. Once or twice, they burned them out, setting fire to their tents, their animals—and their children.
In terms of bloodline, I didn’t know where to place them. Some claimed Romany blood, ancient tribes. None liked the names we gave them; instead of “tinkers,” they wanted to be called “tinsmiths,” and, indeed, they had a rightful claim with their hammers and their repairs. They didn’t like “Gypsies” either.
“We didn’t come from Egypt,” they said, “and we never did,” and they’d been known to fight anyone who said otherwise.
They drank too much and fought too much. Many of them trashed the roadsides where they camped and the pubs in which they drank. Reach for the word “pariah” and you get some idea of their status.
I parked the car a little beyond their caravan and walked back. The man by the fire had a bottle in his hand—beer, not whiskey—and he slugged it as I approached.
His wife said something I didn’t catch; they spoke rapidly, some of it in a dialect.
“God save you all,” I said.
The man with the bottle grunted; this wasn’t the first time I’d been mistaken for a priest.
“Shtand up when the man talks to yeh,” ordered the woman, and said not another word.
What had I expected? That they’d jump at my offer? They didn’t. With no input from the woman, the man stalled. I pressed hard, finally showing him a roll of cash I had prepared. He wanted to finger the notes; I refused, said he couldn’t touch them unless and until we had a deal. He walked around the fire, threw the empty bottle into the field, and walked around the fire some more.
And he muttered all the time, the same words in a kind of speech tune. By standing close to him I picked it up; he was saying, over and over, “I dunno, I dunno, I dunno now, I dunno.”
But I pressed him, and he agreed. We struck the deal that I had been thinking about for some time. In return for cash and my car, and most of its contents except my essential personal effects, he would give me a leather satchel that hung from the door. Made by his wife, as I had guessed from having seen it earlier, it had a pilgrim sturdiness. Over and above that, though, came the concession to which he had been reluctant: I would live and travel with him and his wife for a month.
Ask me why. You know the answer. Atonement. Penance. Restitution. The stories I was telling had led me into a deeper self, a place of greater recognition. Down there, in the deep fastnesses of my soul, I had learned that true repentance comes harder. For a man who liked his comforts, a fastidious man, what colder shriving could I have than to go where I belonged—into the greatest daily hardship and unsanitary unpleasantness that existed in my own country?
It proved worse than I had imagined. I have to be careful here, lest I give the impression of criticizing or decrying people who had scant control over their lives. All they had—and they told me this frequently—was the freedom not to be “settled,” meaning housed with permanent neighbors, in a crowded urban setting. That was the shape of government programs for travelers. For them it meant the death of the life they cherished—one on the open road.
Yet although I don’t entertain in me a jot of criticism or judgment of them, I must report things as I find them. In a month I saw neither person wash. They seemed oblivious of such need. Due to the odor and the cramped space, I didn’t ask to sleep in their caravan; I slept where they put me, in old blankets down between the wheels. Night after night, hail, rain, or snow—fortunately, we had almost none of those—I crawled in and lay down, deep under their wagon, in what most people would call rags.
During the day I walked out and washed my own face in streams and tried to keep clean, especially as I was visiting houses within twenty miles, telling tales if they’d have me. Some didn’t. During the night I would wake up and hear muttering over my head, and never know which of them spoke, and whether it was sleep-talking.
Over matters of sanitation and the like, I draw a veil; all I need say is that I had never before been shouted at by passing children because I looked like a tramp.
As to food, you may dismiss any notion of romantic stew, of rabbit and game, caught and killed on rich estates by lovable rogues. We had tea, endless tea, without milk or sugar, unendurably strong, and we ate stale bread mostly, bought or pilfered or received through charity in the woman’s daily round selling her lucky heather.
After about three weeks, in which we never moved from the same place, the police came by, and their glances didn’t take me for anything other than a traveler. They asked the man—who was not old, but it took time to see that??
?when he was moving on.
“Any day now,” he said.
“That’s what you told us last month.”
“Time flies,” said the traveling man, whom the woman called “Joe.” I never discovered her name, and she never spoke to me. I’d guess her age at early forties. Nor, in essence, did Joe have much to say, apart from a grunt here and there.
Yet they had some kind of tribal signals, because in the second week a rattling old van drew up, with six men. They all knew Joe and his wife, and they brought bottles of drink. One of them produced the necessary form for the surrendering of a car. In the box marked “Sale Price,” I wrote, “Nil. Gift.”
142
Had I been shriven? Did my burden of guilt and remorse feel lighter? Not then, not immediately. This house, where I’m writing now, sits, as you both know, on the side of a hill. Sometimes I get a little flooding at the end of the garden, as the water comes down after heavy rain. In my renovations, I had to take care that I laid wide, deep drains all around the walls, and they are effective; no water comes into the house.
The hill, however, brings a good consequence, too. When this house was built, the owners formed a loose cooperative with other houses on the hillside, and they built a reservoir near the top. It’s fed by rain and, since the late 1940s, by local mains, too.
As a result of the constant and abundant supply and the steepness of the gradient, we all have excellent water pressure. I was therefore able to install something almost unknown in Ireland back then: a shower. I think, Louise, you were the one who said to me once that the force of the water could take the skin off your shoulders!
I said goodbye to my travelers, to Joe and his nameless wife. As my last act, I bought parcels of clothing for them in Ennis and brought them down to the campsite. (It took a moment or two, and some evident banknotes, before the shopkeeper would do business with me.) When I returned to Dublin, I removed all my clothes, dumped them in the bathtub, and stepped into the shower. I ran it until the water turned cold. Then, washed to my bones, I ate some real food.
Although reluctant to allow it into my life, I felt some ease beginning. I saw it almost as a distant light at night, and as I thought about it, I drew nearer to that light. Soon (and I know that I’m pushing the metaphor, but forgive me) I could look into the window of my own soul, as it were, and inspect the damage.
Call it considerable. Widespread. Deep. Savage. Once, in science class at school, we had to polish an old tin frying pan until we could see our faces in it. Then the teacher, with us watching from a safe distance, poured acid into it. We watched as the acid bit into the metal, and naturally we marveled, as we were expected to do—the teaching was in the emotion as much as the science.
In the next lesson, however, came the drama. The tin had blistered, and the blisters had burst, and now we had a surface of blackened, pitted metal. It looked like a dark moon seen through an unclean telescope. Here and there the acid had missed tiny spots, and they still shone brightly. The small places in my soul formed the areas that I had to expand.
That’s when I began to cope with my guilt—when I saw the extent of the damage. Oddly, my giving away of my treasured and useful car hadn’t helped as much as I’d imagined; in fact, I felt profound irritation at myself. So I went and bought another car. Had to. Couldn’t, I felt, go on otherwise.
The descent into a reduced and blatantly unclean way of life—that had helped. I found shriving there, but I also accused myself of being patronizing. Which I had been. And had intensified it by giving the couple clothes and some cash when I was leaving. The message to myself? Be careful how you view what you see as your charitable acts.
I did, however, find that I had experienced genuine healing, or the beginning thereof. It fell into two neat halves: that from a source I could identify and that I felt had yet to come but from a source I knew.
You won’t be surprised to learn what I first identified: the storytelling. Giving of myself in that way, sharing the delight I had always felt, choosing tales with some meaning—that’s where the strengthening began. When I thought of each tale, it was as though the black pittedness retreated infinitesimally and another tiny area of bright tin began to gleam. Oh, sure, I had to polish it—but at least it was there to be polished.
So, in search of story, and in search of the food it provided, I went to work—in a way that paid dividends. Not only did I scan and devour James Clare’s notebooks, with all their stories, and leads to stories, and proverbs, and gnomic, gnostic sayings, I went to an even deeper well. In that month I stayed in Dublin—to re-right my life and stabilize—I began to build a library.
When you first came to this house, on that wondrous and memorable day, both of you did exactly the same thing: you walked around my “bookroom” (I’ve never had the nerve to call it “library”—too grand) and you touched the shelves of books. You took one down here, opened another there, and I saw your excitement. Well, if it proved joyous to you, imagine what it did for me—night after night after night.
Shakespeare led—no surprise there, although I had never expected his poetry to contain so many rewards. Chaucer became my friend, a man both rambunctious and boring—in other words, normal. I saw Dante and Virgil as the two most important figures in my life after Shakespeare, until Horace came along. And then Homer, now that I had a chance to read him at leisure, all but blitzed the lot of them. Until Coleridge came along, and Keats, and Wordsworth, and Samuel Johnson, and Daniel Defoe, and Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats and John Millington Synge, whom my father had once seen walking in Dublin.
It’s an easy picture to inspect, and although the world knows a great deal about self-healing today, we hadn’t a clue back then; I was flying blind.
Gradually, the days became more tolerable. That unceasing and violent drone of accusation in my head quieted—a little, to begin with, and then some more, and then some more. And so on. The familiar and dreaded waking-up pit in my stomach didn’t lurch so deep every morning.
I can’t and won’t put a time on any of this; I don’t know how long it took for tolerable ease to arrive and settle; to be truthful, I still get disturbed visions of those stiff black pools of blood, but not more than once in a while.
Still, I hear you say, and it’s accurate, “That reading of books and poetry—that was all impersonal. What about people? Isn’t it the case that it’s people who heal people?”
I smile at that. Some whom I’ve met could be seen as living proof of the opposite. But it’s true, and that’s where I had the most work to do.
143
Where to begin? Obviously, with my parents. At last, after almost thirty years, I hauled out what I had been concealing and faced it. When my father ran off with Venetia, both parents made me somehow responsible. Or so it felt. My father broke the news to me that he was quitting home, and left me to deal with it. Mother sent me off to fetch him back; I was eighteen. I behaved like an obedient son, but a resentment grew in me.
When I then married Venetia, my father hated me for stealing his love object, and Mother didn’t wish to hear Venetia’s name. Worst of all, they destroyed—and I don’t know which of them did so—all of Venetia’s letters and telegrams to me, imploring me to come and bring her back from Florida. And bring the two of you, also. I had fuel for my fire, didn’t I?
Although I behaved courteously with them, and dutifully if required, the old warmth we’d had when I was growing up had gone. The jokes faded; the shared news, the funny, spiky gossip disappeared. For years after Venetia’s first disappearance, I didn’t go home. When I did, we moved around each other as gingerly as skaters on thin ice. We kept conversation to generalities, such as health, weather, politics, neighbors, farming.
I thought that I’d been the one who had wanted it that way. In my new easing out of my own spirit, though, it began to occur to me that they had felt betrayed by me when I married Venetia. A double betrayal, one for each parent. Perhaps triple—as I didn’t tell them. In
fact, I’d never told them face-to-face; they’d learned it by other means, such as Miss Fay.
Time to put all that behind us, and I knew what to do. With one simple, unprecedented icebreaker. Since I’d left home, in all my travels I’d never brought them a gift. Not for Christmas, not for birthdays. That gauges the depth of my resentment. Now I resolved to visit them, and I wrote a careful letter, inviting myself; it turned up in their papers after Mother died.
For Mother I found a shawl of gossamer tweed, woven by a woman out in Connemara. It had all the colors of the rainbow, but muted and elegant. She hid it minutes after I gave it to her, a sure sign that she thought it precious. It’s the shawl she wore in bed during her last illness, never parting from it.
For Harry I found something different. He liked to sing (I use the word in its loosest form) an old ballad about the racing greyhound Master McGrath, and by great good fortune, that expert in sanitary ware Mr. MacManus, the great bear of Limerick, found me a chamber pot with Master MacGrath’s picture and some verses of the ballad on it.
By the way, Mr. MacManus never mentioned “Alicia Kelly” to me, not once.
When I gave them their gifts, we knew—without a shared glance or word—that the gulf had closed. We had healed the rift. All three of us began to speak at the same time about different things, just as we had in the past. That Sunday with them became one of the happiest days I had known for many years. No difficult topic raised its head, no awkward missteps, no fumbled remarks, no silences.
When I was leaving, they both stood at the car with me, and we talked on for another fifteen minutes. I promised to visit them every few weeks, as I did for the rest for their lives. Sometimes I went oftener than that—despite my own new circumstances.
Miss Fay, Marian Killeen, Billy and Lily Moloney—when I look back it seems as though I must have sat down and taken inventory of the people who had an important emotional connection to me. I shepherded Miss Fay from the planet. She fought every fight she could find: arthritis, rheumatism, cancer.