The Matchmaker of Kenmare (6 page)

She knew too late what I would do. She could see me around the shoulder of her new dance partner. She made the big fellow halt. But she couldn’t stop me.

The men parted like a little Red Sea. I ran at the grinning idiot who’d launched the bottle. He held out his hands and smirked. And I hit him; I hit him hard.

Do you know what it feels like to land a punch? Hard bone or soft squelch—it might be addictive. I knew it well. There had been incidents, I don’t deny it. A kick here. An argument there. I have red hair, I flare. I’d never, though, taken on a man among his friends. Big mistake. As I hit him again, in the face this time, they landed on me. Including the big dancer.

You don’t feel their punches. Not until later. In the first brawl of my life, a stand-up fistfight with my father, I took some heavy blows. I didn’t know their true force until that night. And some of that was emotional pain anyway. These fellows, though, hauled and kicked and hammered. Boots stomped on me. Fists pounded on my head. A hand tried for my throat.

Then the scream rang out. And everything stopped. Miss Begley was standing some feet away, could see only my legs, and guessed that these men wouldn’t be able to cope with a woman screaming. Her shriek pierced even the music, which ground to a sluggish halt, and when some women from across the floor began screaming too, the banshees took over the world.

The men stopped their kicking and punching and stepped away from me. Now a new standoff developed. Somebody hauled me upright by my hair. He bent me back like a bow. The bottle thrower stepped in front of me. He landed a punch deep to the stomach, but the force of my recoil dislodged the grip on my hair.

The fellow had no experience. He could have sent me into kingdom come. He could have knocked me out with an uppercut, chopped me on the throat—he could have killed me. So I took control.

You can do anything to a man once you’ve got him by the hair. If he has a lot of hair, you hold tight and twist. The pain is savage. So I grabbed his head and twisted like a lunatic. I ran this fellow out onto the dance floor. I turned him around and around, hauling on his hair. I dared any of his friends to come after me: “Come on! Watch him lose an eye! Or an ear!” I confess that I’ve cleaned up what I yelled.

Nobody expected what happened next. What happened next was Miss Begley. She strode forward and she slapped my face. Very hard.
Twice.
Slap-slap
. And then twice more. She pulled my hand from the bottle thrower’s hair. She shoved him away, then turned him around. She took his fist and mine and made us shake hands.

“Pair of schoolboys,” she said. “Ridiculous.”

But we squared off again. I threw the first—and vicious—punch. Right into his stomach below the sternum. Would have killed an older man.

That was the moment at which two strangers walked into the dance hall—and that was the beginning of so many things, and the continuation of so many things, and the end of so many things.

If I’d seen as many films by then as I have since, I’d have laughed out loud—because they arrived like the cavalry. Except that they were infantry. Their names, not that it matters, were John and Hugh; one tall, one short. Clean as whistles, funny, relaxed, and curious, they wore the uniforms of American soldiers and said to us, “C’mon, guys. Cut it out.”

Typically in an Irish brawl, the antagonists will forget their differences, turn on the outsiders who try to stop the fight, and derive their enjoyment from kicking them. We didn’t. Perhaps it was the uniform; perhaps it was the American accent, reminding us of all those emigrant dollars that had kept our country alive for decades now; perhaps it was the clean authority that the two soldiers offered. Whatever the reason, my opponent and I looked at each other foolishly and shook hands.

Miss Begley said, “Go outside and cool down. Talk to each other,” and to me she hissed, “Don’t interfere with my work.”

One night, more than a year later, when she was in low straits, I reminded her of “the night of the fight in Killarney” and it made her laugh, but she didn’t find it amusing at the time.

Outside, my enemy told me his name—Sean Durkan, a young sheep farmer, and he’d had too much to drink, and I said, “I was drinking all day,” to which he said, “Where would we be without it?”

Loiter
is a good word to describe how we stood. Dancers would keep arriving until long after midnight, as the dance didn’t end until four o’clock in the morning. We greeted people whom we knew or thought we knew, and then Sean Durkan threw up for a while, and then we loitered some more, smoking cigarettes, and making useless but pleasant conversation, mostly about farming, fiddle music, and drink.

The fight, though, must have stirred something in me, because after a lull, during which Sean Durkan had been chatting with some of his newly arrived friends, I heard myself say to this youth, “Did you ever meet a fellow by the name of Cody?”

I had never mentioned his name to anybody—except the police.

“Cody?”

“Raymond Cody. Ray Cody.”

He dragged on his cigarette. “What’s he like?”

“Did you ever see a water rat?”

Sean Durkan laughed. “There’s a lot of them around. It’ll be hard to spot him.”

But he’d picked up something in my voice, he’d detected a cold shift, because he recoiled a little and added, “Jesus boy, I don’t want to be there when you meet him.”

That was all. He knew nothing about Raymond Cody, he knew nothing about me, yet he felt the menace.

In time, the two American soldiers came out from the dance to see us and smoke a cigarette. They told us that they were stationed “in Londonderry,” which they described as “more than a hundred miles due north” from where we stood in the dark of the night, cigarettes glowing, distant music floating its way to us.

Their uniforms attracted passersby, curious and friendly. Every household in the country had relatives in the United States, and therefore people couldn’t have felt warmer. And those open-faced, calm young men made it easy for everyone, chatting, offering cigarettes, looking for beer, asking about the girls—the things soldiers do all over the world. As an encounter it seemed normal, pleasantly interesting, fine.

During this, and all through my alfresco conversation with Sean Durkan the sheep farmer, Miss Begley had been emerging now and then from the dance, and always with a lady in tow. That was more or less
what I had expected to see. She kept these women out of earshot, but I could see from the heads bent toward each other, and the intense body attitudes, that she was conducting intimate and powerful conversations with them. At the end of each talk, she took from her small white clutch purse a notebook, and in it she wrote things, then handed the women pieces of paper—her name and address.

My professional interest kicked in. Who were these women and girls? I knew who they were—the future wives and mothers of the southwest. Kate Begley was, among other things, the broker of the next generation.

As a consequence of my fight, she told me, Miss Begley changed her plans; she decided not to stay Saturday night in Killarney. With no more than a quick introduction to the two young Americans, she arranged for a hackney driver to take her back home. She insisted that I go with her. En route she sat as far away as she could from me in the back of the car and spoke not at all. I, dabbing my split lip, feeling the sore bumps on my head, speculated that she might have been disgusted.

Dawn had almost broken on the coast. As the hackney clattered and rattled away back down the lane, Miss Begley halted at the door and didn’t lift the latch. She laid a hand on my arm and a finger to her lips. And then I heard what she was hearing: the ocean.

We stood there for long minutes, amid the beating and shushing noises, with now and then a seabird’s call. When she stepped forward on the little plateau outside the house, I followed. A low sea-mist had draped the coast in a long gray stole. Above its shoulders, offshore and inshore, I could see the hundreds of scattered rocky outposts, fragments of the ancient mainland.

Maybe it’s the pure vision of hindsight, but I swear the ocean at that moment represented something. My personal history had left me charged up by words such as
destiny
and
fate
and I began to feel as
though I were standing on the edge of something else enormous, something that would prove as far beyond my control as the white breakers below.

Kate Begley felt it too. I know it, I saw it. She covered her face with her hands as if she’d had a sudden surge of emotion. I eased forward for a better view of her, and for the first time I saw her vulnerability. I saw the child who had lost her parents and who had countered that loss using such tools of life as she could muster—courage, skill with people, any small power she could get her hands on. Most of all she relied upon a blind faith that her lost parents would return to her one day.

Standing there with her, in the gray, tremendous silence, remains one of my most powerful images of our relationship—which, in all its myriad forms, began in earnest that dawn.

I slept so deeply that she had to shake me at noon. My head and stomach hurt.

“Every pain is a lesson, don’t you know that?” But she giggled as she said it. (By the way, it seems that she destroyed her notes regarding the brawl at the Farmers’ Dance; there’s evidence of pages ripped from her journal around that date.)

The house, when I reached the kitchen, had the same air of blue coolness looking out on brilliant sun that you’ll also find in deep France or the American Midwest. August on the southwest coast of Ireland offers two seasons at the same time—deep summer and rising fall; that morning, they had merged again. I lurched straight for the open door, across to the mouth of the steep little pathway, paused, and sucked in ozone to clear my head.

Miss Begley followed, sidestepping spiky yellow gorse. On the fast slope, I feared losing my footing but I didn’t want to stop. Yesterday’s drinking and last night’s fight had now begun to stab me; remorse is a knife that twists when it’s in you. As the familiar abuse ramped up inside
my head, I walked harder—but I began to slip on the steep grass. The waves lashed up, too close for comfort, their menace a cold cobalt on that heavenly, serene day.

“Where d’you think you’re going?” she called down.

Outwardly, I didn’t answer. Inwardly:
To perdition
, muttered my mind.
To the green, cold safety of the seabed. To oblivion—again
.

“If you fall,” she shouted, “you’ll slide down onto those rocks and into the sea. I won’t be able to help you.”

I halted and turned back.

“What are you doing?” She had her hands on her hips. “Are you trying to run away from me?”

I said, “I’m sorry.”

True emotional pain is internal. We keep it to ourselves.
Sorry. Yes, sorry, I’m sorry. Sorry am I that my spirit has died. Sorry’s the name of the horse I ride
.

“Ben MacCarthy, what’s up with you?”

I repeated, “I’m sorry. I want to apologize. The fighting and that.”

“Did you think I was going to scold you?”

“But I was badly behaved—”

She wouldn’t let me protest. “Come on, Ben.” She held out both hands, like a forgiving mother to a small child. “Come on. You’ve had enough trouble.”

I said, “But I didn’t behave well.”

She said, “You got me home safely, didn’t you?”

I began to climb back up the pathway, saying good-bye to some vague notion of shriving myself in the chilling sea. She took my hands.

“You’ll be all right. We’ll get you there.”

Light on her feet as a pony, Miss Begley turned and went ahead of me.

Back inside the house, Mrs. Holst sat at the fireplace. She said nothing, didn’t even glance at me.

Hey, Mrs. Holst. It’s me, Ben. Come on, you old bitch, look at me. Tell me why you don’t like me. If I told you that I’ll one day likely inherit four hundred acres of prime Tipperary land—you’d look at me then, wouldn’t you?

I hadn’t seen her on my pained way through, and I apologized.

“My head isn’t very clear this morning, I’m afraid, but that lovely day out there—it’ll clear soon.”

Well, we don’t have to speak to each other, you disapproving old sow
.

——

No electricity in that house, and no running water; they cooked on the fire, which even now in the late summer smoldered with peat, not too hot, and aromatic—most comforting.

At lunch, I ate little and remained as silent as good manners permitted. The women chatted to each other, principally about the dance. Miss Begley’s smiles for her grandmother, her touches—a hand on the shoulder, a fetching of food, an adjusting of her shawl—warmed, I felt, not just that kitchen, but the entire coastline back as far as Dingle.

I had notes to write and returned to the room in which I’d slept. Through my open door I could hear Miss Begley tell Mrs. Holst about the girls she had interviewed. She made her grandmother laugh out loud many times—and she never mentioned my regrettable antics.

A couple of hours later, when the afternoon had grown quieter, the rest of our lives began. We all heard the engine, we all listened from our respective chairs, and I swear to this day that I knew who had arrived—the two young American soldiers from last night. A third man rode with them, and he was the world changer.

For the moment, I’ll stick to the simple facts of what I saw in him that day. I saw a serious, considered fellow a few years older than I and some inches bigger. His name, he told me, with a handshake of oak, was Charles Miller. He had a grave, open face and large eyes.

By now, since so much is over and done with, I can say what the grandmother, Mrs. Holst, told me years later: “From the moment Miller walked through that door,” she said, “I sensed the power and felt the fear.”

She was like that, Mrs. Holst; I tend to scoff at all claims of hindsight. In that case, however, I’m inclined to give the old woman the benefit of the doubt.

Some years later when we were discussing it, Miss Begley said that she
too had been anticipating “something.” Maybe she was, but there’s no trace of premonition in her diaries, whereas from the moment I met Charles Miller, I made notes about him in my personal journal.