Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (4 page)

H
ere we meet the other main players—beginning with my father. Venetia Kelly said to me once, “Your father has the most beautiful skin of any man.” When, sometime later, I repeated that observation to my mother—without, of course, attributing it to Venetia—Mother said, “Yes. It mirrors his dear mind.” That she said it without a hint of bitterness told me a lot.

Forget the fashionable belief that sons never get to know their fathers; I came to know mine very well. I loved him, truly loved him, this tender man of great kindness and haphazard brilliance, this clever man who was as wise as an oracle and as stupid as a dribbling fool. I’m sure you’ve known people like him. We Irish have a lot of them—men who can be smarter than scientists and stupid as dolts.

There were times when I wondered was I, his only child, the only person who saw him fully, the one human being who knew that he wasn’t at all what he appeared to be? Beneath the farmer’s clothes, the muddy boots, the stained old tweed cap, the hands with the texture of wood and leather, the harsh instructions to lazy workers, the jovial talking to the cows as he milked them, I saw a different man. Deep inside, my father
was loving, committed, sophisticated, and civilized, and with a vivid sense of humor.

Also, as I saw, he was mad when he wanted to be—stone mad, mad as a cut snake, writhing this way and that, convulsing with passion.

Sometimes Mother would surprise me with a gratifyingly accurate rendition of him, because for all her difficulties with him, she loved him more than she loved her own life. In a society where the word
love
had no above-the-surface currency, where sentimentality in relationships was a taboo, where couples circled around each other in duty and agreement rather than affection or caprice, she loved him more than she loved me, and I don’t mind that.

So if in passing she gave me some insight into him, I would first inhale it like a drug, and then reel back in surprise at her perception.

“Your father is a century late,” she said once. “He should have lived in Lord Byron’s time, with all the other wild men.”

Another time she said, “Your father is a useless card player. Everything shows in his face.”

Mother was brisk and practical, or so I used to think, and didn’t usually show much insight into people and things. And then she’d make a revealing observation about my father; or I’d go back and recall the Incident of the Animal.

The Incident of the Animal—I reach for it when I want to remind myself that Mother did have a true grasp of the world, and the way things are. She just lost it for a while. And I reach for the Incident because of the ultimate lesson it taught me—that when something is hurtling toward you, and you know it’s frightening, and you know you’re right about that, it may not always be frightening or dangerous in the way you think. But that doesn’t reduce the fright or the danger. Sometimes its purpose is to bring foreboding—and foreboding can be a friend, but you must listen to it.

The Incident began when the Animal came hurtling down the hill in front of the house one September afternoon.

I have this belief, which I’ve held since a small boy, that I can see at a glance how the world evolved. The wheel? Easy—the rolling of a log suggested the idea, and then they cut a log into disks, and Eureka! Religion? Call on a bigger power to smite a big power—call on something bigger
than the wind that’s making such a noise in the leaves, or, more terrifying, thunder. And it also has to be a power that you can’t see. So—invent it. Pray to it long enough and the thunder fades and the wind dies down. Sex? Easiest of all—make sure that the nerve endings in those crucial places are so exciting that we’ll want to go there again and again. Trite? Obvious? Unoriginal? Perhaps—but not at twelve years old.

At any rate, I was standing in the porch, admiring the light again. Thanks to the sun pressing through the stained-glass windows, the floor seemed littered with colored petals. By turning my head just a little I could see how golden the world was outside, how russet and ocher the trees. The green bench under the large beech had just been freshly painted.

We had a white fence that ran all around the property like a priest’s collar. It took years to erect; it came in from the main gate, broke away from the front of the house, and swayed up the hill in a parade of snowy rails. My father always said that as soon as the end of it had been painted it was time to start renewing it: “Like-like-like life itself,” he used to say to me and I never knew what he meant; I do now.

The part of the fence that ran up the hill field had a foolish place on the farm. What was the need to split an already difficult acreage? Especially since we owned all the land? That fence gave us nothing; all it did was run right up through the middle.

That afternoon, though, the fence paid for itself—because its stark white graphic rails showed me the large black object that was galloping along beside it and heading down toward the house. What was it? A wild thing, and terrifying. The gate from the field to the forecourt—and therefore to the house and me—stood wide open. I stared and stared; I couldn’t make out what it was. The thing had legs at the usual four corners; beyond that I couldn’t say much by way of description.

“Mother!” I shouted loud.

Father had gone to Templemore to collect a clock being repaired there by a man whom he liked to meet; this clock maker was, by all accounts, the biggest liar in the county.

She came running—because, as she said later, the fear in my voice would have frightened God.

“What is it, Mother?”

“Well, it’s an animal anyway,” she said.

The Animal’s front bulked twice as large as it should have, the head didn’t sit on the shoulders in a normal manner, and from its chest protruded some massive, indefinable growth.

It had a basic shape—more horse than, say, rhinoceros; more donkey than, say, elephant—but it traveled like no horse or donkey I’d ever seen—or, for that matter, like no rhinoceros or elephant I’d ever imagined. And it seemed agitated—it swung its great lump of a head in all directions, and even at a distance of several hundred yards I could see the flecks of spume spraying from its nostrils. Also, it was huge—higher, broader, and thicker than any horse or cow we had on the farm or in the stables or had ever bred. And bulky as a cliff.

On and on it came, its speed getting up to a near-gallop, loping wildly along by the fence, crashing into the white rails, bouncing off them and smashing into them again; how they didn’t shatter I’ll never know. At any moment it would careen through the gate, pound onto the gravel of the forecourt, and perhaps head straight at the glass porch where we were standing.

My father’s double-barreled shotgun stood in the corner of the porch. He often took a potshot at a juicy pheasant and then lamented the side of his nature that caused him to “Kill-kill-kill God’s creatures.” I looked at the gun, but I knew it would be too small to bring down this thundering black beast. My great-grandfather’s elephant gun, a bell-mouthed blunderbuss, sat on a bracket over the fireplace in Mother’s little study—but what ammunition could we use? My terror grew.

Mother stared as only she can, her eyes narrowing, her body a tall, slim cylinder of concentration. Hands on hips, she peered harder—and then walked out of the house and strode across the gravel to the open gate. Toward the creature!

On came the Animal and my heart came close to stopping. I didn’t know what to do. The manly part of the boy fought the coward, the self-preserver. Should I help? And what assistance could I give? Shouldn’t I be at Mother’s side, indeed ahead of her—but who would run for help if the monster destroyed both of us?

I split the difference, as, when I can, I’ve learned to; I left the porch but didn’t go as far as the gate. And, as I most certainly always do in life, I watched and watched.

The Animal slowed down and I heard its noises. Like a distressed
asthmatic it wheezed and spluttered; and it seemed in agony. Explanations for its existence seared through my head: It had come from a family of prehistoric creatures long hidden in a land beneath the caves up in the mountains, and one of their number had now found a way into the outside world and was frightened at being unable to find its way home.

Or it had come from the next farm, the Treacys’. Mr. Treacy was a vet and a breeder, and his house was full of exotic stuffed animals. Maybe he had for years been experimenting at crossing ordinary breeds with exotic animals and this strange hybrid result had broken out of his sheds. Or maybe such a creature had indeed long existed in Borneo, known only to a few adventurers and zoologists. And it had at last been captured and, in circumstances of great secrecy, was being transported to England for a zoo there, but the ship had docked at Waterford to discharge cargo, and when the holds opened the Animal escaped.

I was soon answered. The Animal slowed down to a walk, still heaving its great head. I could hear Mother speaking to it, soothing and soft, “Yes, good boy, good old boy,” and the Animal was responding. Now it had slowed to a saunter. Then it hung a hesitant mooch over toward the gate on which Mother leaned. The creature’s great head drooped lower and lower; I thought it was probably abashed at its own foolish carry-on. And then it stopped, right at the gate. Another miracle from Mother! Whom I had seen juggle plates for a bet. Who could cast a dry fly into a salmon’s mouth from Ballygriffin Bridge. Who could do coin tricks.

Cautious as a fish, I walked over. By the time I got there, and saw Mother stroking the creature’s nose and forehead, and with her sleeve wiping away the foam from the mouth, the Animal had quieted.

Not a prehistoric fugitive from beneath a time-trapped lake in the Galtee Mountains; not a Frankensteinian crossbreed escaped from Mr. Treacy’s sheds; not even an exotic capture from Borneo. This was a massive Clydesdale plow horse, twenty-one hands high if an inch. By way of comparison, our tallest three-quarter-bred was seventeen and a half hands.

Its head seemed distorted because it wore a large plowing collar that had come loose, worked its way around the back, and swung ever wilder the more the horse tried to shake it off, and it had forced the horse to carry its head awkwardly high to one side. As to the growth on the front, a large and decorative knee-length harness medallion had been hung on
the horse’s chest, but it got buckled in some collision suffered by the galloping animal, had worked its way up to the horse’s face, and had begun to bite into its flesh, and was thus wedged.

Mother took command. In those days she had the gift of always being understood. She walked around to the horse’s shoulder and began to pat it further. The poor creature accepted her affection so readily and eagerly that his nuzzling almost knocked her off her feet.

“Get Billy,” she told me. “Tell him to bring a ladder. And go for Mr. Treacy.”

Billy Moloney ran our farmyard, and was constitutionally unable to speak a sentence in the English language without, as Mother put it, “cursing like a sailor.” She and I worked out a method by which I could report his conversation to her; every time he swore I would substitute my father’s euphemism “flock.”

I found him in the milking shed.

“What she want a flockin’ ladder for?”

“A big horse,” I said.

“Big flockin’ horse to want a ladder.”

“He’s very big, Billy.”

“Ah, flock it,” he said. “I’ll get the flockin’ ladder. Jizz, God, you’d swear I do have nothing else to flockin’ do, Jizz, flockin’ wimmen, flock it.”

Billy sometimes bisected words with a profanity: “cata-flockin’-gorically” and “un-flockin’-deniably.” Sometimes he doubled down on his lexicon; my father claimed that he once heard Billy say “cata-flockin’-flockin’-gorically.” As my father remarked, “Prob-prob-probably for emphasis.”

While Billy fetched the ladder, I climbed on my bicycle and rode up the hillside path through our woods to find Mr. Treacy, who followed me down in his truck. He recognized the horse. It belonged to a plowing team that went all over the country giving demonstrations. A week later, when the horse was being collected, the plowing team told us that a rat had spooked the horse, and the horse had bolted. By the time the poor Clydesdale reached us he had traveled more than twenty miles.

That night, with the horse fast asleep in one of our loose boxes, Mother told the story to my father. She turned to me and said, “Why were you so frightened?”

“I didn’t know what it was.”

My father said, “Ask-ask-ask your mother for her lecture on seeing things.”

Mother said, “In this world, there are two of everything. There’s the thing that we see—like this sugar bowl on the table. And there’s the thing we think we see. When the thing we see is the same as the thing we think we see—fine. If it’s not—watch out for trouble.”

She delivered this in that voice of hers that I grew up with—a voice that had no threat in it, a voice that up to then had never been raised at or against me. How could I have anticipated the ferocity, the persistence in this tall, capable woman with her boy’s haircut, who had the most beautiful hands I have ever seen? And, as I’d find out, a capacity to make dreadful errors, and reap terrible harvests.