Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (53 page)

“No. I’ll dictate it. Now.”

“All right, all right,” he said, and I thought he had relief in his voice.

“No, no,” said King Kelly.

“Tom,” said the lawyer, his voice inflected with warning.

I had long had it ready in my mind and I said, “I, Thomas Aquinas Kelly, do hereby give back to Harold and Louise MacCarthy their farm at Goldenfields. I cancel any mortgage that I once had on that entire property, and I state that at no time in the future will I ever try to state or reinstate any claim of any kind to it.”

The lawyer said, “Well, God knows, that’s clear.”

I repeated it, he wrote it down, called in a secretary—a woman who walked sideways into the room, and sideways back out, and sideways in again, with several typed sheets, the original and copies. She—standing sideways—witnessed King Kelly’s signature.

“Give me the other paper,” said King Kelly.

“No, give it to me,” said the lawyer.

As I handed over the Luke Nagle report, I asked King Kelly, “The men on the property. Where are they?”

“There’s only Mary,” he said, as sour as a quince.

The rest of the proceedings took two days to complete. Two wonderful days, they were, two days of incomparable rejoicing, two days of relief and restoration. Without boasting, I can say that I did it all, I organized everything, and I sent a telegram to Venetia:
ALL WELL. HOME SOON
.

You may find my first act surprising—my first act after driving down home, that is. Not wanting to hurt my father’s feelings, I hid the Daimler.

Near our entrance stood an old ruined farm building, down a kind of awkward and overgrown lane that ran parallel to part of our driveway. Through grass as high as the door handles, I nudged the Daimler toward
the old ruin, turned it around so that it faced the direction I had come, pulled aside the branches that covered where there had once been a stable door, and backed the car in. Then I pulled the branches back across the door—perfect concealment.

Nobody stopped me as I walked up our drive—no soldiers, no blue shirts. The house looked deserted, although I heard sounds from the yard, some barks, some whinnies.

Our car, the Alvis, was parked to one side and looked as though it hadn’t been used. I knew why—it was too well known locally and any driver other than my father or me would have raised questions.

I walked in. My house. My home. My place of birth. I knew that I was going to do this right.

Mary Lewis heard the footsteps and came from the kitchen. She looked terrified.

“Don’t hit me, Ben, don’t hit me.”

The insult! As if I were like that!

“Mary, I need you.”

Never did she work as hard. And probably never would again.

“Two things, Mary. You’re to clean this house from top to bottom. And you’re to speak to nobody. If anybody asks you a question, you’re to say only that you’re not allowed to speak.” She nodded. I felt like a young commander, barking orders. “Where are Billy and Lily?”

“They haven’t been here for weeks, Ben.”

“Who’s in the yard?”

“Only Ned Ryan, Ben. And the dog. And Bobbie Boy, Ben.”

I left her to her terror, told her I’d be back later, and drove off in the Alvis.

My next port of call brought cheers and shouts.

“Flock! Flock! Flockin’ great out!”

Large Lily almost swore too, but Billy dominated. He wouldn’t stop shaking my hand. “D’you know what, Ben, you’re flockin’ cat, that’s what you are, flockin’ cat.”

Though I never got to the bottom of that Irish term
cat
, it means marvelous and wonderful, and I was flattered by it. Speaking of which, when they’d left our house, they had taken Miss Kennedy, who now rubbed herself against my legs.

Billy told me that everybody in the locality hated King Kelly. “Even
them of his own flockin’ stripe. You should hear Davey Treacy, the vet; he said to me, ‘Billy, I wouldn’t give that Kelly fella the flockin’ time of day, he can flock off with himself.’”

Since Mr. Treacy had the mildest manner and the cleanest mouth in the county, I had some adjustments to make to get a clear picture.

Billy and Lily and Miss Kennedy sat in the car with me as I made three more visits—to Mollie May Holmes, Joan Hogan, and Kitty Cleary. They behaved, those three women, as though I had garlanded them with flowers. Such excitement!

For the rest of that day, we all toiled. Billy hadn’t been in the yard for several months, not since King Kelly had thrown him and Lily off the property. He fumed at the lack of care evident in Bobbie Boy. Large Lily began to order Mary Lewis around like a slave.

And I—I slept in my own bed that night, and helped Lily put my parents’ room back to rights. When I opened my bag I found the note from Venetia:
Dear Ben
.

Washing, ironing, polishing, cleaning—such a surge of effort; the gratification! At noon next day, I fetched the three women. It proved difficult to fit them into the Alvis because they had prepared so much food.

And at five o’clock, with the sun still in the sky, I walked down to the cottage holding in my hand the lawyer’s piece of paper, signed and witnessed.

The range of human emotions isn’t always wide enough. Or we can’t—or daren’t—expand on it. I watched it in my parents that evening, and I think the word
daren’t
applied. Neither took it in fully; they delayed its digestion. This time at least, I found the cottage door open.

They never heard me coming, and each started in fright at the big shadow that loomed in the doorway. Both rose, and my father pushed his spectacles back on his head, saying, “Well, look who’s here.”

Mother said, “Did you travel far? Have you eaten?”

I said, and I couldn’t hide my smile, “You’ll need to be sitting down.”

They were my children now. Just for that afternoon and evening. Like toddlers they sat obediently in their chairs, looking at me, not knowing what was to come.

I pulled the piece of paper from my pocket and began to read from it: “‘I, Thomas Aquinas Kelly, do hereby—’” A little overcome, I had to
stop and start again. “‘I, Thomas Aquinas Kelly, do hereby give back to Harold and Louise MacCarthy their farm at Goldenfields. I cancel any mortgage that I once had on that entire property …’” I stopped.

“Show me that,” said Mother.

I handed it over; he looked over her shoulder. She took his hand and they couldn’t look at me, but I was fine with that.

Mother had a saying that I loved—because she said it with such satisfaction. She said it everywhere, around the house, in the garden—she even used it to potty-train me. Now she said it again as she looked at me.

“Job done.”

They walked up to the house, arm in arm. I went ahead, just by fifty yards or so, to tell everybody that they were coming. A long table had been set out in front of the house, as we sometimes did on fine summer days. White linen shone in the sun—and piles of food glistened.

In a row behind the table stood Lily and Billy—no sign of Mary Lewis—and Mollie May Holmes, Joan Hogan, and Kitty Cleary. They didn’t applaud or anything like that. It wasn’t their way. The most they managed was “Howya?” and “Welcome back.”

My parents shook hands with everybody. Mother looked at the food and began talking about recipes, and my father asked Billy to bring around Bobbie Boy.

Nobody left that table until ten o’clock that night. Billy, who had been off the drink since my father’s initial departure, didn’t touch a drop. He drove the women home.

My parents, Lily, and I tidied up. Mother inspected everything, the rooms, the floors, she ran her fingers along high edges looking for dust.

All she said was, “Is this your doing, Ben?”

They went to bed. Lily walked home. I sat alone in the porch. There was a moon that night, and it lit the white railing that needlessly divided the field, and down along which the Animal had galloped in the Incident.

I left a note for my parents:
I’ll be away for a while. Expect letters from me
.

The driveway in the moonlight stretched as clean—I thought—as the life ahead of me, and as I strolled I sought the honeysuckle that Venetia had admired. I stopped to savor it, and taste the moment, and then, a hero again, I strode on. The car wasn’t seven leagues away; I reached it in minutes.

D
o you remember how I described the first night that I drove in the dark? That dank and awful night, with the goat’s greenish-yellowish eyes on the roadside? This night bore no resemblance to it. I didn’t drive; I rode a magic carpet. Isn’t it wonderful what happens when you’re driving under a full moon? It appears, it’s gone, and then, like a child playing a game, there it is again, above a new hill.
My friend the moon
, I remember thinking,
my friend the moon. And tomorrow
, I thought,
my other friend the kind old sun
.

With a flourish I parked the Daimler outside the house. Midnight.
Minuit
, the French call it. The witching time.

The witching time?
Why did that sinister phrase from
Hamlet
cross my mind at that moment? “’tis now the very witching time of night, / When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out.”

I stepped from the car and kicked something. A head. A head lay in the street. Blarney’s head. It had been hacked from the neck. Inside the front door, which stood slightly ajar, I found his torso, his arms, his legs.

T
hey took Venetia away. And they took Mrs. Haas too. Nobody saw it happen. They left two significant traces to tell me a story. One was the death of Blarney, the brutal slaying. I gathered the pieces, I saw how he’d been hacked—so savagely that I was surprised not to see blood. His head had been attached to a long “neck,” a thick tube that went down into his body, where Venetia could reach in through his back and turn his head with a lever. They had sawn the head from the neck just below the chin. His feet had been cut off halfway up the calf, the hands at the wrists. That was the first message to me.

The other trace told me who had done it—Cody. Cody knew that we had a suitcase of money in the house. He’d brought it down from Donegal, and we were deciding how much of it to bank, and how much to use in cash bargaining for rent or property. And Cody knew where we were hiding that money, in a closet upstairs, covered over by boxes. He had taken out the suitcase but he’d taken only some money, not much, and left the rest there, out on the bed, in the suitcase.

It must have happened minutes before I got there. Everything had a fresh feeling—the teapot in the kitchen was still warm.

Do you know that moment, that suspended, almost happy moment when you know that something awful has happened but you’re still thinking that it hasn’t? That night, in that house, I had that feeling, and it seemed to last for a time. When it ceased, I screamed. I ran all over the house calling out Venetia’s name, yelling for Mrs. Haas.

And I knew that nothing would come of my shouting, I knew that something so bad had happened that I had no mechanism to address it.

I also, without much effort, knew the truth. Cody had been planted in the traveling show by King Kelly—which explained their familiarity with each other. And Venetia’s disappearance was my punishment. Cody, probably with some henchmen, and almost certainly at gunpoint, had taken her away in the middle of the night.