The Last Storyteller (23 page)

“Why are you telling us, Ben?”

“So that you know.”

“Did they follow you here today?”

“Who knows? Are they outside?” This caused further unease.

One of the men said, in Irish, “There’s nobody out there; we can see for miles.”

I asked, “What did he just say?”

Jimmy lied: “He wants to know if we can trust you.”

I said, “How many people have told you something like I’ve just told you? That I’m being followed. Why would I tell you that, Jimmy?”

One of the men whispered in Jimmy’s ear. I was in an old black-and-white gangster film, and any moment now a fat man would come through the door with a mournful face and a gun.

“Ben, what’s your reason? Come on.”

“Simple, Jimmy,” I said, and it was, at last, simple and clear. “I don’t want to be caught in the middle, and yet I want to record what happens.”

He was so quick. “But if they find your notes?”

“They won’t find them.”

“How do you know?”

“Jimmy, I have more hiding places on this island than you fellows.” This brought a general smile.

One of the men, the most senior, said, again in Irish, “Ask him how he’s going to do this and not get caught.”

“So how will this work? How come they won’t catch you with a notebook? You wrote down a lot of stuff when I was with you, and there were other people around.”

I said, “The funerals last week. I was at one of them. As you know. When I leave here now, I’ll go somewhere quiet, and I’ll make sure that nobody has followed me. And I’ll write down everything I saw and heard here, and I’ll hide that notebook immediately. Nobody will be identified by name. In the years ahead, when it’s safe, when this is all over, I’ll retrieve the notebooks and write it all up fully.”

Everybody considered this. And the most senior man said, “I don’t believe you.”

Three things happened at once, in a frantic outbreak of anger and catastrophe.

“I don’t believe him, either,” said another. And a third. And a fourth.

The senior man slipped the safety on his weapon and, in Irish, gave an order to the two men beside him:

“Take him out. You know what to do.”

Marvelously, I didn’t sweat. Nor did I move. I pretended not to understand. But when somebody hammered on the front door I, like everybody else, jumped. And then came the chaos.

The door to our room burst open. But nobody stood there—it had been forced in by a savage swirl of water. That hammering from outside had been a lookout telling us a flash flood had hit the river.

The first wave struck that old dining room like a swirling liquid tornado. I remember the noise—a gigantic, spurling
splash!
as though a giant single tide had slapped tons of water against a seawall.

The long, massive table heaved, floated for a moment, and spun upward in a slow, wet whirl; then it crashed down and was dragged along the room. Chairs tumbled after it, higgledy-piggledy, bouncing off walls,
vanishing beneath eddies and rolls. A gulp of cold water hit me in the fork of my legs.

A second wave, a brown and dirty wash speckled with twigs and leaves, hit the far wall and rebounded at head height. The men who had remained in a group were spun like dolls. They crashed into one another and got struck by chairs or the edges of the table as they fought to keep some kind of footing. And failed.

Water hit them everywhere. I saw men clawing at their own faces. Going down. Coming back up again, terror in their eyes. No comprehension of what might happen to them.

A third surge devoured Jimmy Bermingham. The men nearest to him fought to get to the door. Sheets of water blew them back in. They plowed out again, arms flailing, trying to keep their guns above the water, which had now reached shoulder height and was climbing fast. This wave looked big enough for surfing, and it lashed in with a deep rolling, punching splash. From the fireplace came a sucking noise, as the water tried to climb up the chimney.

Jimmy went under like a twig. Behind where he’d sat, the water ripped a shutter from the windows. Trying to stay tall, I glanced out. As far as I could see, roaring waters raced around every square foot of open ground near the house. It was as restless and as mad as the worst form of anger. The road had disappeared.

I had a leaf in my mouth. Something else, something slimy, slapped across my eyes. I clawed my face, too, trying to think, trying to reason. Jimmy Bermingham’s head came up at my knee, and the heavy shutter cracked him across the skull; he couldn’t have stayed conscious. I recall having the thought
Live by violence, die by violence
.

His head came up once more. Even in the water I could see the darkness of his blood. With some skull injuries, we scarcely bleed; with others, we gush like a stuck pig. Jimmy’s scalp poured—and down he went again. The water hit me in the chest and sent me flying backward.

By now I had nothing left to do but survive. I went under, and took in a mouthful of watery grit. My head hit something—a dining room chair, submerged by the wet weight of its heavy cushion. One of the legs stabbed me in the cheek, another caught me in the chest; I fought off this octopus, and then used it to lever myself upright.

In a momentary lull I got my head and shoulders up, blubbered the filthy water from my mouth, and stood on my feet. The furniture washed here and there, in savage, rolling motions. Some of the table had come apart; as it swung past me, the edge caught me in the crotch.

I grabbed the table and held on. But I might as well have been holding a rope in a high wave; the table pitched me here and there and up and down—I had to let go.

To my right, the door began to bend off its hinges. The water now came in like a tide, a few low waves and then a spasm as high as the transom. Something crash-tangled into my legs, and I reached down to free myself. I caught cloth. A person. Jimmy B. I grabbed him, hauled him up. Unconscious.

Keeping his head above water, I waited until the great burst had passed. Then, in waters still chest-high, I hauled him to the door. A nasty stinger of a wave hit us so hard that it washed his head clean, and for a moment I saw the gashed whiteness of his wound.

Outside the wrecked dining room, the long, narrow hallway had become a funnel, a tunnel, a crazy tube of rushing water. Though I kept my feet, my head was under, then above, then under again, then above again. Lugging Jimmy, I tried to walk and managed to take a step at a time and hold it.

After three such steps I found handholds, the lowest reaches of the staircase. I caught the banister. My hand slid from the foot of a wet upright. I fought to get another grip. Made it to the foot of the staircase before the next big surge. And it was the biggest of all.

But it washed us up the stairs, and deposited us almost on the landing. Then it ebbed fast. I hauled Jimmy up another flight. And then another. The waters slammed up the stairs again and snarled at our feet.

The infamous Shannon flood of 1957 rose to twenty-five feet high inside Kilconnell House and more or less did for the place. Later reports spoke
of “a wall of water that raced down the Shannon and wrecked everything it reached,” including one and a half floors of that great old manor.

Will you be surprised if I report elation? We were high and dry. Is that what people feel after surviving water? I have no comparisons to make, have never known anybody who beat a flood. Genuine, bulging elation, a huge and immediate reward—that’s what it was.

It didn’t last long—a flash, perhaps: I had work to do. Jimmy’s face was blue; blood poured from his head. I laid him flat on his back and began the procedures I had learned in school.
Is he drowning?
I wondered.
Has he drowned? Is he unconscious? That’s some wound
. I was able to move his head sideways, as though it were a marionette’s.

Water spurted from his mouth and nose.
Jesus, turn him over—it’d be quicker; it’d all pour out
. A rhythm began in my head, in tempo with my thrusts on his chest.
Jimm-mee. Jimm-mee. Jimm-mee. Jimm-mee
. And still the water blurted from his mouth. Now flecks of blood began to appear.
Oh, my Christ! Keep the rhythm going. Jimm-mee. Jimm-mee. Jimm-mee
. I checked his tongue again, found a twig in his throat, tugged it free. Pressed even harder.
Jimm-mee. Jimm-mee. Jimm-mee. Jimm-mee
. From his hair some mud fell on his eyes. With my icy, wet sleeve I wiped it away, wiped his forehead. He twitched. I grabbed his hair, lifted his head, and with my free hand pressed his chest.
Jimm-mee. Come ON! Is he breathing?
Are you breathing?
JIMMY!

He didn’t recover enough to speak. I kept wiping his face, kept clearing his airways, made him belch, stood him up, supported his head, walked him up and down. Every step I took squelched. Every breath rasped. Those waters had hammered me, too—but not as badly as Jimmy Bermingham. The blue color faded and a gray took over, an awful pallor.

I don’t know how long I walked Jimmy that day, up and down, up and down that sodden, freezing upstairs hallway. It could have been ten minutes, it could have been an hour. I failed to make him conscious. The nearest I got was a kind of half moan, a grunt. Below us, the waters raged and boiled like a mad, vengeful herd. Those vicious surges—they hungered for destruction, and they lashed the downstairs rooms again and again.

And then suddenly they stopped. Subsided to a calm and orderly receding flow, slipping backward gentle and slurping out of the house. With Jimmy’s head a ton weight on my shoulder, I looked out the window
at the end of the corridor. The waters outside, though still trying to hold on to the land, searching for claw handholds here and there, like a man slipping down the face of a cliff, had begun to slide back to the river.

My car appeared above the flood.
That engine will be useless. There’s the roadway. I can follow its track
. Soon all the mad tides had returned whence they had come, the great flood bore died, and the river slid back within the boundaries of its own banks. The Shannon family of water devils calmed down.

Not a human being to be seen—nothing but large gray-brown pools and puddles. I eased Jimmy downstairs. The flood had claimed one man inside the house, a thin fellow whom I had seen among the group but whose voice I hadn’t heard. From the angle of his head I guessed that his neck was broken. I stopped, tried to manage his body with my foot, a gentle probe. When he flopped over, I saw that his face had been smashed in like a pug dog’s; blood leaked everywhere. His fingers had broken and meshed in the trigger guard of his rifle.

I got Jimmy to the road. Following the sun, which had begun to appear, I hauled him along. To my right, the river beside us kept up its fast gurgle. Not a house in sight; now I knew why, and wondered who had been so foolish as to build a house so low beside such a volatile, whimsically violent creature.

Exhaustion arrived. I could feel the blood drain from my face. Then, in a high field on my left, I heard our saviors. They had bunched together, making an untypical collective
Moooo!
Cattle, still venting their alarm.
If there are cattle, there must be a farm; if there’s a farm, there must be people; somebody will come
.

“Somebody” arrived on a tractor, with hay piled on the trailer. He saw us, a man named Lane, a gentleman. Down the hill of the field he came, having dumped the hay faster than I know he wanted to, and got us onto the trailer. How Mr. Lane did it, I don’t know; I was no help to him.

Jimmy almost died. He had multiple problems: hypothermia, a fast-moving respiratory infection, and, not least, a crazed split in his skull.

“You’d think he’d been attacked by a crooked carving knife,” the surgeon in Barringtons Hospital told me.

I had no such injury. When my exhaustion had passed, and I showed no infectious symptoms, I did my own examination. A cut in my thigh;
a scrotum swollen to plum-purple; a hip bruised to look like a map of Italy. And no warm or dry clothes.

The hospital kept Jimmy for seven weeks. I stayed two days; through Mr. Lane and his excellent wife, a woman of immediate and strong capabilities, I organized clothes, and then my car. It needed a new battery, a new alternator, a new floor on the passenger side, where the river had hammered in a rock like a nail.

I took the train to Dublin and recuperated with Miss Fay, who was so pleased to have my company that it almost made the entire river fracas worth it. When all became settled once more, I confined my travels to within a forty-mile radius of Jimmy in his hospital bed.

A life of some normality returned, with little pressure and less fear, as I prepared myself for the Goldenfields auction and the pain of losing my home.

Goldenfields: from the moment I’d known the auction date I’d “planned” my feelings. I described to myself what would have to happen, and then asked myself what I might feel. And with no chance of enjoying what I expected, I tried to prepare myself.

I had, for instance, to find storage for what I wished to keep. My parents wouldn’t have room in their new home for all their furniture. They needed to sell things for convenience, not for financial reasons, and in any case, since I would be their sole heir and legatee, the proceeds of everything would eventually come to me.

Best to go home several days in advance. As well as my own boyhood things—my room had remained the same since 1932, the year I married Venetia—I felt attachment to many other items scattered throughout the house and gardens.

A furniture warehouse in Cashel offered storage facilities. I had no idea where to live. For three or four days I trucked to the warehouse the pianola, still in excellent condition, with dozens of music rolls; our dining
room table and our breakfast room table; my bed and the two dressers that went with it; the large, long, yellow bookshelves and all my books; the two armchairs from either side of the fire in the parlor, in one of which I had sat with Venetia leaning against my knees the first time we had ever been alone.

I kept many of the pictures, including the four Stubbs, and of course you know how valuable they proved. They bought houses for both of you, and added to my pension. And we’ll still have enough for you to live on for the rest of your lives. When I told my father how much they’d yielded, he whistled.