The Last of the High Kings (3 page)

About half a mile away, on the edge of the level plain at the bottom of the hill, Nancy McGrath called in on her elderly neighbor Mikey Cullen. He always went across to ring in the new year with Nancy and her family, and she had come over to collect him. But she found him in a poor state, huddled beside a feeble fire, shivering with cold.

Nancy put a blanket around his shoulders, stoked up the fire, and made him a cup of tea. The old dog, Belle, followed at her heels until she realized that Mikey either had forgotten to feed her or was too ill to do it. That had never happened before.

“Are you all right, Mikey?” she said. “You don't look too good.”

Mikey growled and pulled the blanket more
tightly around his bony shoulders.

Nancy fed the dog. “Will you come over to our house and toast the new year?”

“No, no,” said Mikey. He trembled, and the tea slopped onto the knee of his trousers. “I'd hardly make it over there, I'd say.”

“I think you're sick, Mikey,” said Nancy. “Shall I send for Dr. Walsh?”

“No,” said Mikey. “'Tis way too late for Dr. Walsh. You'd better send for Liddy.”

J.J. answered his mobile and listened to what Nancy had to say. He had known Mikey Cullen all his life and was very fond of him. Since before J.J. was born, Mikey had been a regular at the céilí dances that each successive generation of Liddys held every month in the converted barn beside the house. He had danced vigorously through his sixties, more sedately through his seventies, and finally, at the age of eighty, he had hung up his boots. For another year or two he had continued to attend the céilís, sitting at the side of the dance floor and letting out a yelp of delight when the musicians made a particularly good key change. But over the last few months, unable to make the walk across the fields and up the hill to the Liddy house, he had been absent. Any number of people had offered
him lifts, but he wouldn't take them. He was happier at home, he said, beside his fire.

J.J. missed his presence at the dances and called over to see him whenever he could find the time, and since Mikey couldn't come to the music, J.J. took the music to him. It was not an act of charity. Mikey was always wonderful company. He was unusually tolerant for someone of his generation and never had a bad word to say about anyone. He had been delighted to see the wave of immigrants that had started arriving in Ireland twenty or thirty years before and had been the first person in the area to employ “foreigners” to help him on the farm. He loved everyone, regardless of his or her failings, and there was no question now of J.J.'s refusing his summons.

“Can I come?” said Donal when he heard where J.J. was going.

J.J. glanced at Aisling, who shrugged. “I suppose so,” he said, looking at his watch again. “We'll be back by midnight, assuming all's well.”

“Ring me if it isn't,” said Aisling.

Donal packed his old black dot accordion into its box, and J.J. picked up his fiddle. Outside, the rain had stopped, and the cloud cover was breaking up. In patches of black silk sky, cold stars were shining.
Somewhere, still hidden, the moon was almost full, and the gray limestone crags above the farm looked as liquid as mercury in its filtered light.

It was a walk that J.J. always enjoyed, but they took the car in case Mikey was seriously ill and needed to be taken anywhere. Donal sat in the passenger seat, silent and serious, clutching the box on his lap. He was a mystery to J.J.: a calm, quiet child, almost invisible in a household full of large, colorful characters.

“Everything all right?” he asked him.

Donal looked across at him and smiled. “I learned ‘The Cow That Ate the Blanket,'” he said.

“Good man,” said J.J. “We'll play that for Mikey tonight.”

 

Belle met them at the door. She had been beautiful in her younger days, but now, owing to her habit of sleeping too close to the fire, her coat was singed all over and grimy with ashes.

Mikey struggled out of his chair.

“Sit down, sit down,” said J.J. “How are you doing, Mikey?”

“Not so clever, J.J. But I'm not dead yet, and I can still fetch a drink for a musicianer.”

“I won't take a drink, Mikey. I'm driving.”

“What harm?” said Mikey, pulling a bottle of whiskey from the dresser and reaching down glasses. “You'll hardly meet the guards between here and your house.” He was unsteady on his feet, and J.J. shadowed him, ready to catch him if he fell. “What'll the young lad drink?”

“I'm fine,” said Donal.

“Indeed you are fine,” said Mikey. He turned to J.J. “Will he have a small drop? For the night that's in it?”

“He won't,” said J.J. “He's only nine.”

Mikey poured three large glasses anyway, and then, leaning on the furniture, he made his way back to the fireside chair. As he lowered himself down into it, he groaned. “Oooh. All my joints are seized up, J.J.”

“You need a drop of oil, so,” said J.J.

“I do,” said Mikey. “But I can't find out where to put it. Amazing they wouldn't tell you that, isn't it?”

J.J. laughed. “Do you not have the manual, Mikey?”

“Whatever about the manual, you have the cure there in your hand.” He pointed to the fiddle case, and J.J. and Donal began to unpack their instruments.

As they played, J.J. wondered whether there wasn't some truth in what the old man had said. The music might not have freed up Mikey's joints, but it, and no
doubt the whiskey too, certainly lubricated his spirits. They played tunes that he knew, and he called out their names and began keeping time, first with his fingers on the arm of his chair, then with his palms on his knees, and finally with both feet on the ash-strewn hearth. Between the sets of tunes he reminisced about old times: the dances he had attended; the people he had met at them; the sweethearts he had never, in the end, married. By eleven o'clock, when he got up to refill his glass, he was a lot steadier than he had been, and his cheeks had lost their unhealthy pallor. By eleven-thirty, when J.J. announced that it was time for them to go home, he looked ten years younger, and he refused to let them leave without one more tune.

So Donal played “The Cow That Ate the Blanket,” and J.J. quietly poured their untouched whiskey back into the bottle. There was no chance Mikey would notice. He was sitting up straight in his chair, slapping his knees and roaring, “Go on, ya, boy, ya!” and “Up Galway!” Donal played the tune through five times and finally wound up with a dramatic chord. Then he and J.J. packed up their instruments, and Mikey accompanied them, slowly but very steadily, to the front door and out into the yard.

The last of the clouds had drifted eastward, and the sky was clear. The moon was so bright that they could see one another's faces.

“You should lock your door, Mikey,” said J.J. “You never know who might come wandering around these days.”

“Sure, if I lock the door, how will I ever get out?” said Mikey mischievously. “And besides, who would I be afraid of? Amn't I the last of the High Kings?”

J.J. had heard this before, many times. Not just from Mikey either. There were people all over Ireland making the same claim. But it was new to Donal.

“Are you?” he said.

“I am,” said Mikey. “And when I'm gone, that will be the last of the Cullens. The last of the High Kings.” He swept an outstretched arm in a semicircle that might have encompassed the tiny yard, the whole of Moy and Funchin, or the entire county of Galway. “It all belonged to the Cullens at one time.”

The moonlight was even strong enough for J.J. to see the face of his watch. It was eleven forty-five.

“Well, Happy New Year to you, Mikey,” he said, edging toward the car.

“The same to you,” said Mikey, “and many happy returns.”

“Go in now, before you get cold,” said J.J.

“I will,” said Mikey, “but come here. There's something I want you to do for me.”

“What's that?”

“I won't be seeing another new year.”

“Ah, now—” J.J. began, but Mikey cut him off.

“No, no. Hear me out. There's one last thing I want to do before I die.”

J.J. was aware of the clock racing toward midnight. In another minute or two he was going to have to choose between offending Aisling and offending the old man. He wished Mikey had thought of saying all this at a better time.

“What is it you want to do?” he said.

Mikey pointed up past the Liddy house toward the top of the mountain. “I want to go up there. I want to stand on top of the beacon one last time. Then I can rest in peace.”

J.J. stared at him. There was no road to the top of the mountain. There wasn't even a path. Whichever direction you approached from, it was a long, steep climb, way beyond the capacities of a stiff old man like Mikey.

J.J. laughed. “There's only one way you'll get up there,” he said, “and that's in a helicopter.”

Mikey nodded. “That'll do rightly. Will you organize it, so?”

J.J. had one last chance to avoid offending anybody. He hustled Donal toward the car.

“Leave it with me, Mikey,” he said. “I'll see what I can do.”

Hazel came in, exhausted but extremely happy, at about 3:00
A.M
. The minibus had dropped her at the end of the drive, and she had walked up to the house in the moonlight. The boy she liked most in the world had smooched with her all night, and when she got back from Cork—if they ever got there—she was going out on a date with him. Everything seemed perfect.

She let herself into the house and closed the door quietly. The light from the upstairs landing spilled down into the hall, and as she passed the sitting room door, she could see Jenny still sleeping on the sofa and a couple of empty wineglasses beside the hearth. She was tempted to see if there was any wine left in the bottle but decided she'd probably had
enough for one night and went on up to bed.

She couldn't sleep, though. The house was silent, but her mind was full of noise. She replayed the songs she had danced to with Desmond and tried to remember the things they had said, or shouted, to each other. She dreamed about what she would wear on their date and how they would look together and what everyone would say when they learned that Hazel and Desmond were an item.

At four-thirty she was still awake, tired now of the circuit of imaginings but still charged with adrenaline. She got up to go to the bathroom, and as she padded across the landing, she heard, from downstairs, the soft creak of hinges and the snick of the Yale lock's tongue. She did a quick mental reckoning. All the family were in. There was only one thing that sound could mean. She hurtled down the stairs and out through the front door. If Jenny was running, she would be too late already, and the trip to Cork would be delayed again.

But this time Jenny wasn't running. She was standing in the front yard, gazing up at the clear white face of the moon. The cloudless skies had brought frost with them, and Hazel winced as her bare feet met the icy flagstones. But Jenny didn't appear to notice them.

“The moon,” she said dreamily as Hazel came to stand at her side.

“The moon,” Hazel repeated. “Still nighttime, Jen. And we have to go to Cork tomorrow, remember?”

“I forgot,” said Jenny.

“Never mind,” said Hazel. She wasn't always so patient with her wayward sister, but she was feeling adult and generous tonight. “I think you'd better sleep with me in my bed now, in case you forget again.”

Jenny followed her back into the house and up to her bedroom.

“You hop into bed, Jen. I'll be back in a minute.”

This time Hazel made it to the bathroom, but she didn't make it back to bed. When she came out onto the landing, she found her father sitting where she had been earlier, at the top of the stairs.

“Well caught, Hazey,” he said. “Have you got a minute?”

“What now?” said Hazel. She looked at her wrist, but her watch was on the bedside table.

“I know it's late,” said J.J., “but this is important.”

Hazel sighed and sat down on the step beside him.

“Did you have a good night?”

“Brilliant,” said Hazel. She was tempted to tell him about the gorgeous Desmond but decided, for
the moment at least, to keep it to herself.

“Good,” said J.J.

Hazel waited. J.J. rubbed his palms together between his pajamaed knees.

“Well?” said Hazel.

“Um,” he said. “Well…I know this is going to sound a bit weird, but how would you feel about becoming a teenage mum?”

Hazel stared at him. In the pale glow of the landing light he looked old and tired. She could see dark rings beneath his eyes.

“Dad!” she said indignantly. In her wildest dreams she hadn't gone that far. “I haven't even got a boyfriend yet! Well, at least—”

“No, no,” said J.J. hurriedly. “I don't mean really. I don't mean—” He ground to a halt, and she could feel his embarrassment hanging in the cold air between them. He seemed unable to continue.

“Perhaps you'd better start at the beginning, Dad,” said Hazel.

J.J. stood up and stretched. “I think I'm going to let your mother do the driving tomorrow,” he said. “I think I'm going to make a cup of tea now and tell you a very strange story.”

 

Down in the big farmhouse kitchen J.J. told Hazel how, more than twenty-five years ago, he had gone to Tír na n'Óg, the Land of Eternal Youth, and how he had met Aengus Óg, who had turned out to be his grandfather and was therefore her great-grandfather. He told her how he and Aengus had gone to meet the Dagda, who was the king of the fairies, and how they had found the time leak that had been destroying the two worlds.

The story, it seemed to Hazel, went from mad to worse. There were times when she feared for her father's sanity and wondered whether she should slip off upstairs and wake her mother. The trouble was that some bits made sense. It explained why J.J. was such an exceptional musician and why his playing was so distinctive. It explained why the fiddle he played sounded so much better than any other she had heard. So she stayed and listened, and when he finished telling her about that visit, he told her some of the things that had happened since then and why it was so important that she play her part in the plan he was hatching.

“Your mother can't have any more children.” He finished up. “She had an operation after Aidan was born, and everybody knows that. Otherwise she could do it herself.”

“But I thought you said I didn't really have to have a baby?”

“You don't,” said J.J. “But your mum couldn't even pretend to, you see? Everyone would know it wasn't hers.”

Hazel said nothing, and after a while J.J. went on. “Will you sleep on it, Hazey? Let me know tomorrow?”

Hazel thought it would probably be easier to sleep on a barbed-wire hammock than on the bizarre stories she had just been hearing. But she didn't want to say anything that would prolong the conversation.

“I suppose so,” she said, and escaped to the relative safety of her bed.