The Last Storyteller Read Online Free PDF Page A

here.”
    “They want me to marry a man out the road here; he has a big farm of land. My father’s after whipping me twice.”
    “Whipping you?” I said.
    “Look.” She twisted in the seat, leaned forward, and took down a shoulder of the red sweater. A broad weal, mauve with evil, ran under her straps.
    “He’s over fifty years older than me,” she said. “But he has pucks of money.”
    “Did he whip you, too?” asked Jimmy.
    “He says that when he looks at me he gets tears in his eyes. He says ’tis pure joy. But I think he has stomach trouble.”
    “Probably always had a bad bag,” said Jimmy, sounding full of wisdom. “The stomach gets at you early in life.”
    “I take it you don’t love him,” I said.
    “If I knew what love felt like, I’d tell you,” Elma said.
    “Hah, we’re the boys to teach you that,” said Jimmy Bermingham. “Aren’t we, Ben?”

10
    Emer turned Malachi MacCool down in favor of a younger man. Thus the drama sharpened. I thought that I heard an owl in the trees outside. Or was it the wind in the chimney?
    “He’s the son of a chieftain,” Emer said to Malachi. “I hope you understand
.
He’s nearly the same age as me, and he will be the chieftain himself one day.”
    Mal, though stricken to the heart, nodded his head in agreement. Not so the farrier, who raged and ranted. He grabbed his daughter by the arm and began to shake her like a child shakes a doll. Mal, ever the gentleman, intervened. Holding the blacksmith at arm’s length, he said to Emer, “Go to him, go to your young man.” She kissed Mal on the cheek and stepped away from him
.
    Malachi MacCool locked himself in. He never again came out to walk his fields or inspect his beloved cattle. He kept his rooms dark, because he never again wanted to distinguish night from day. His cook left meals for him outside the door. Mal didn’t eat the meals. He saw nobody, spoke to nobody, not even his trusted steward. Inside his chamber, he pined away, and if you do not believe that a man can die of a broken heart, then you do not understand the story of Mal MacCool and his love
.
    John Jacob drew near the end. His telling, though it had rambled across seven counties, never for a second lost the original thread. As he described Mal’s decline, he powered up and grew more urgent. His voice cracked just enough, his eyes gleamed with tears, his shoulders reflected all the mourning of a great man brought low by love. This was grand opera, in solo recital.
    One morning, after days of silence, the steward and his men broke down the door of the bedchamber, and they found Mal dead on his great gold chair. They buried him in his highest field standing up in a stone cairn. From there he could look out over the valley—a valley he had owned from horizon to horizon
.
    There was no inheritance, because there had been nobody to whom he wished to bequeath anything. His property was raided the day after the funeral and the house ransacked. Adjacent farmers staked claims to his fields and fought over them, killing men in their land hunger. Eventually they settled it all, and when their greed had subsided, every trace of Malachi MacCool and his estates vanished from the land as water seeps into the earth
.
    Now, in the final stages of the telling, John Jacob sat taller in his chair, and as his hands and upper body grew ever more animated, his voice took on a freight of regret.
    Emer married the chieftain’s boy, and they had three sons and threedaughters. But, as some women do, she realized over the years that she had married a bad egg, a worthless man who would rather talk than work
.
    She lived for her children, though now and then she allowed herself to think of Mal and his proposals of marriage, and his frantic words of love to her. And sure enough, bit by bit, she began to spend the rest of her life pining for him. By the time her own journey to the next world had begun, she was more in love with Mal MacCool than he had ever