The Last Storyteller (46 page)

“Why?”

That morning, he wore a tweed jacket I’d never seen before, dark blue herringbone, and the top pocket had a navy kerchief with white polka dots. He also wore a navy turtleneck sweater—he looked sixty, not eighty.

“In some countries,” he said, “a storyteller can act as a healer. If there’s
been violence. A murder, say. And there was a man killed in Templederg recently. Nobody knows who did it, they believe it’s a local person, and they’ll all be in a troubled state.”

“What do we do?”

He said, “We’ll go to Templederg, and we’ll go to three houses, and in each house I’ll tell them a story. It will unite them, and that’s a healing process.”

Stooped as I was, over the map spread out on the table, a chill spread like a slow flood of ice water across my back. Why was he doing this?

He made me drive through Templederg at first—a prosperous place with a strong creamery, a village hall in good condition next to the church, and many of the houses well looked after. We found a place to park, sheltered and under trees, and we could see the lights of the houses ahead of us.

The first man to open his door blurted greetings and pleasure. No warmer welcome existed. Three children, aged about ten to fourteen, sat at a table with their schoolbooks. Down at the far end of the kitchen, a woman stood at an ironing board. That scene played every evening in hundreds, if not thousands, of homes across Ireland.

I discovered that John Jacob had visited this house long ago; these children formed the third generation he had met. They knew all about him here, and so did the wife, who came forward to greet us. Glasses of whiskey soon gleamed in our hands.

John Jacob said, “Do you know why I’m here?”

“It’ll be a welcome thing you’re doing,” said our host, whose name was JohnJoe. “You’ll see a crowd.”

We ate with the family. Perhaps for the purposes of my education, John Jacob reminisced with JohnJoe and his wife about his visit to this house and, in another county, her family home.

He got them to tell their memories—of his arrival, how the evening
built, the stories they remembered. JohnJoe’s wife served heaps of the same diet that I knew from all over the country: bacon, eggs, soda bread, tea. Since I’d known him, John Jacob had always eaten more than I did, and it never showed on his big frame.

We pushed back from the table and found places by the fire. As though somebody had rung a bell, people began to arrive—neighbors, with and without children. Soon thirty people had gathered in that kitchen.

I had heard of this many times, in houses all over the country: some kind of unexplained bush telegraph. Nobody had quit the house since we’d arrived, and they didn’t have a telephone—so somebody must have seen us walk through the dusk down the village street, as though it were a hundred years ago, and knock at this door.

Some houses did have the reputation as haunts of the
seanchai
—“rambling houses,” or, to give it a Gaelic name,
cuartaiocht
, which translates as “visiting.” In such houses, music and dancing would break out when the storyteller had finished telling his tale.

Not, however, on that somber night. The conversation hung at low decibels; few smiled; nobody laughed. One by one, the villagers settled, many of them anxious, and John Jacob began:

“When a visitor comes to your house, he brings the outside world with him. And he brings the feelings of the universe, for you to inspect them. And you may select from those feelings whatever you need at that moment. And that’s why the magic of the world directed my feet to Templederg tonight.”

He began to light his pipe. For the thousandth time I watched his technique. And I observed how people watched his hands and the tobacco and the tamping down and the flare of the match. They looked rapt.

“You’ve had an unfortunate occurrence in your midst. A man from your village was taken away and murdered. Many of you heard it happen, and that’s almost worse than seeing it. And you saw his blood on the ground after he was hit on the head, and some of you saw him dragged away. Most of you heard him scream. But you haven’t found his body, and you haven’t found his murderers, and therefore you have no means of mourning.”

He had a fire to him that night. His eyes sparkled, not with humor,
no trace of that, but with something else. I reach for the word “zeal”—but that’s an unsafe word; it smacks of evangelism. “Fire” might work; he certainly exuded some kind of flame.

“Worse than that, some of you fear that you might have brought this murder among you. That fear will divide you. And my job is to tell you tales that you can all listen to of an evening.”

I looked around the room. JohnJoe’s wife had her hand to her mouth. Other faces, male and female, defined the word “thoughtful.” And never did the children know such a time to keep silence.

You must understand, Ben and Louise, where we were and who we were. A peasant society, certainly, but with high levels of natural intelligence. Now, in a time of acute pain and fear, these people needed something other than their norms. At one stride we had returned to a kind of spiritual paganism, an intense humanism almost, a reaching for primitive beliefs in the power of the human spirit to learn how to heal itself.

Nobody in the room would, of course, have put it like that. Except John Jacob Farrell O’Neill. I learned it from him. And from James Clare, and from the warriors and princesses and heroes and maidens and druids and wizards and chieftains and bards who stood in the shadows of that room that night, returned from the shadows of time and the universe to help their descendants to a better life.

This is what took place—and it went on until five o’clock in the morning. John Jacob now had the full and rapt attention of every body and soul in that room.

“I’m going,” he said, “to tell three stories tonight in the village of Templederg, and I will tell them in three different houses. Some people among you here have seen this done before, by me and others of my wandering tribe. When I have finished the first story, I will leave this decent place and go to a neighbor’s place, and any of you who feel like it, and who feel that the next house can accommodate us as our little band of people grows, will be welcome house by house.”

Heads nodded without thought.
Will he need a field to fit in everybody? Or will this be some kind of magic whereby hundreds of people will stand easy in a room made for ten?

He rounded off his opening thought: “Before the cock crows to tell us that the sun is on his way up from below the rim of the sky, we’ll have heard the third and final tale.”

PART SEVEN
The Last Storyteller

And so we come to the final chapters of my
apologia pro vita mea
. You will see why I rank that night as the most extraordinary of my life—because so much flowed from it. Perhaps I should tighten that definition of “extraordinary” to “extraordinary and good.” We already know what the “extraordinary and bad” was.

John Jacob told each of his three tales to exactly the length of two hours. He told me afterward that he did it “by instinct.”

“But you didn’t look at a watch. And I don’t remember seeing any clocks. Not in your eye line, anyway.”

“The world gives you a kind of rhythm,” he said.

He did something else during the evening: he became a kind of timeless figure. As I watched him, he changed. A new spirit entered and took up residence in the well-dressed and well-tended old gentleman by the fire, in his natty tweed jacket and polka-dot pocket handkerchief.

Now I saw a man of no age, yet gnarled by centuries. Now I saw a man carefully holding himself together, yet assailed daily by the wind and the rain. Now I saw a man who did not live in a “strong farmer’s house with all the modern conveniences” but a man whose roof was the sky, or a barn with swallows darting to and fro under the eaves, or the dense canopy of a tree in full summer leaf.

The commanding figure by the fire had not come there that evening; he had been here eons ago, when the houses were wooden, with one hopeful slot in the ceiling for the smoke to escape. He had walked into this place centuries ago, when the floor and the walls were made of mud
and sod, and the people shared with him their oaten stirabout and goat’s milk, which was all they had. He had walked into this village decades ago, when the first gleams of freedom were banishing the dark angels of poverty.

I looked at him and saw not the charming and muscular John Jacob O’Neill with the twinkling eyes—I saw the figure who, without my knowing it, had all my life been the most important portrait in my own private gallery, the leading member of my inner cast. What was James’s word? The “culmination.”

I was seeing an archetype. Not a local character, such as a ballad singer or a blacksmith; this was a visitor from the world stage, a vital cog in Man’s spiritual machinery. In all the faiths, in all the hopes, in all the belief systems of the world, one figure and one only held the truth for me, and therefore the healing: the storyteller, the one who tells us who we are, and who has done so since God was an infant.

John Jacob was that archetype that night, and as though to prove it to my eyes, he shape-shifted, as if he’d been in an old legend. He changed from the man who had been with me in the car, with the navy turtleneck sweater, the ruddy cheeks, the impeccable hands, the power thrumming away beneath the surface.

Now I saw a man in a long black coat, a black hat, and powerful, shiny boots; a man with a face of stark, white parchment whose deep-set eyes glowed like coals and whose hands punched each dramatic point; a man who turned his head slowly, like a searchlight, seeking out every face listening to him and compelling it not merely to hear but to
understand
.

I saw a younger man, still in black but with a hint of the clerical in his shirt and collar, a priest or a schoolteacher, and I realized that I was seeing a fugitive, a man to be shot on sight because he possessed learning. Shakespeare knew it: “He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.” This man was bringing to these people out under the trees and the hedges the thrill of Ovid, the power and yearning of Dante, the beauty of Virgil and Horace, and would, if caught by the red-coated soldiers, pay for it with his life.

And I saw, too, a tall man in a robe with a staff, entering the castle hall and being made welcome, and sitting on great cushions, and eating and drinking, and then, invited to stand beside the king and queen, telling a tale, in ravishing language and flowing verse and eternal feeling, a tale by
which a kingdom could be governed, on which a nation could be founded.

From the first house to the second we went, and from the second to the third, and no matter how humble one fireplace, or how comfortable another’s parlor, the power escalated. Three tales he told that night, and he moved people to all the emotions they possessed; the tales touched on the five senses, too, and as they listened, people saw, heard, tasted, smelled, and touched.

Example: “The king reached forward, took her wrist, laid a gentle finger on it, and said to her, ‘Feel. This is your life coursing through your body. I want to flow in that stream.’ ” I swear that most of the adults in that room and all of the children reached for their wrists.

We walked back to my car. John Jacob took my arm. Before we stepped into the shade of the trees, he stopped.

“Look,” he said, pointing. The faintest sliver of light, milk white touched with yellow, had begun to open the sky. “I’m giving you that,” he said.

Sad to think that there had been a time in my life when I wouldn’t have understood what he meant. Good to think that I then grasped it in depth.

Back at the house, I took over. He slumped in a chair, exhausted, while I lit the fire and prepared the breakfast he liked, oatmeal with cream and honey, and, this morning, whiskey. I laid the table as elaborately as if for dinner, made tea strong enough to stand a spoon in, and led him to the table.

We ate in silence. The food revived him. I risked a compliment:

“You were magnificent. I don’t own words enough to praise you.”

He raised his great leonine head and looked at me.

“Thank you, Ben. I’ll treasure that remark.”

“It’s true,” I said.

I reflected, but didn’t tell him, that he had moved several notches up the scale from the performances he had given for me, even including the drama of Ballyneety.

We ate on, and finished the pot of tea.

“You must be exhausted.”

“Food always revives me,” he said. “And we had a lot of food last night.” He laughed. “That’s how I kept going.”

True: at every house in which we’d appeared, the people had insisted on feeding us.

“How much did you prepare? Mentally, I mean.”

He said, “It’s difficult to tell. I’m preparing all the time, in a way. My mind is always looking for new structures, new styles, new methods of stating things.” He paused, reached for his pipe. “Do you have notes for me?”

Startled, I looked at him. “You mean—a critique?”

“Yes. What could I have done better?”