I sighed, and Finn replenished my brandy.
“Has he got you to take riding lessons yet?” guessed Finn. “He’s great for that. A dozen pals have run through here, hired the horse, followed the hunt, and broken their selves, collarbone over ass, in the years before you limped in.”
“It’s these riding boots I bought.”
“Which makes you halfway to the stable or the hospital or both, as of this hour. But here comes the boyos. Say not a word about himself. They would look down on you if they knew what you were hiding from here.”
“Don’t they look down on me already?”
“As a yank? Sure. But as a fellow drinker? No. Hush.”
And the young men and the old of Kilcock blundered in for the stuff that cleans mirrors and makes headlights shine.
I retreated to the philosopher’s cubby to think.
Chapter 17
I walked straight into the back workroom of Courtown House, where John was going over and answering some mail, and I did not hand him my usual six pages of screenplay. Instead, holding the pages in my hand, I took my tweed cap off my head, looked at it, looked down at my hacking coat and twill pants and jodhpur half boots and said, “John, I’m getting rid of at least half of these clothes.”
John looked up and gave me that lazy, half-lidded iguana stare.
“Now, why would you do that, kid?” he said.
“No more riding lessons, John.”
“Oh?”
“No more lessons and no more even trying around the edges to ride to hounds.”
“Why do you say that, kid?”
“John.” I took a deep breath. “What’s more important, riding to hounds or killing the Whale?”
John mused it over behind his eyelids for a moment.
“What counts?” I said. “Me alive and the Whale dead or me six feet under and the screenplay not finished?”
“Let me get this clear—”
“No, John, let me get this clear. I almost fell three times this morning at the riding academy. It’s a long way down from a horse, John, and I’m not going to go there.”
“Jesus, kid, you sound upset.”
“Do I?” I listened to myself. “Yeah, I am. Is it a deal, John? From here on, no black horses, just white whales?”
“Jesus Christ,” said John, “if that’s the way you feel about it—”
Chapter 18
Someone’s born, and it may take the best part of a day for the news to ferment, percolate, or circumnavigate the Irish meadows to the nearest town, and the dearest pub, which is Heeber Finn’s.
But let someone die, and a whole symphonic band lifts in the fields and hills. The grand ta-ta slams across country to ricochet off the pub slates and shake the drinkers to calamitous cries for More!
So it was this long day with suddenly no rain and—look there!—the sun returned in fraudulent simulation of some lost summer. The pub was no sooner opened, aired, and mobbed than Finn, at the door, saw a dust flurry up the road.
“That’s Doone,” muttered Finn. “Swift at bringing news. And the news is bad, it’s that fast he’s running!”
“Ha!” cried Doone, as he leapt across the sill. “It’s done, and he’s dead!”
The mob at the bar turned, as did I.
Doone enjoyed his moment of triumph, making us wait.
“Ah, God, here’s a drink. Maybe that’ll make you talk!”
Finn shoved a glass in Doone’s waiting paw. Doone wet his whistle and arranged the facts.
“Himself,” he gasped at last. “Lord Kilgotten. Dead. And not an hour past!”
“Ah, God,” said one and all, quietly. “Bless the old man. A sweet nature. A dear chap.”
For Lord Kilgotten had wandered their fields, pastures, barns, and this bar all the years of their lives, they agreed. His departure was like the Normans’ rowing back to France or the damned Brits pulling out of Bombay.
“A fine man,” said Finn, drinking to the memory, “even though he did spend two weeks a year in London.”
“How old was he?” asked Brannigan. “Eighty-five? Eighty-eight? We thought we might have buried him long since.”
“Men like that,” said Doone, “God has to hit with an ax to scare them off. Paris, now, we thought that might have slain him, years past; but no. Drink, that should have drowned him, but he swam for the shore; no, no.
It was that teeny bolt of lightning in the field’s midst an hour ago, and him under the tree picking strawberries with his nineteen-year-old secretary lady.”
“Jesus,” said Finn. “There’s no strawberries this time of year. It was her hit him with a bolt of fever. Burned to a crisp!”
They fired off a twenty-one-gun salute of laughs that hushed itself down when they considered the subject, and more townsfolk arrived to breathe the air and bless himself.
“I wonder,” mused Heeber Finn at last, in a voice that would make the Valhalla gods sit still at table and not scratch. “I wonder. What’s to become of all that wine? The wine, that is, which Lord Kilgotten has stashed in barrels and bins, by the quarts and the tons, by the scores and precious thousands, in his cellars and attics and, who knows, under his bed?”
“Aye,” said everyone, stunned, suddenly remembering. “Aye. Sure. What?”
“It has been left, no doubt, to some damn Yank drift-about cousin or nephew, corrupted by Rome, driven mad by Paris, who’ll jet in tomorrow, who’ll seize and drink, grab and run, and Kilcock and us left beggared and buggered on the road behind!” said Doone, all in one breath. “Forgive my going on, Yank.” He turned to see me exiting the cubby. “I meant only half what I said.”
“Aye.” Their voices, like muffled dark velvet drums, marched toward the night. “Aye.”
“There are no relatives!” said Finn. “No dumb Yank nephews or dimwit nieces falling out of gondolas in Venice but swimming this way. I have made it my business to know.”
Finn waited. It was his moment now. All stared. All leaned to hear his mighty proclamation.
“Why not, I been thinking, if Kilgotten, by God, left all ten thousand bottles of Burgundy and Bordeaux to the citizens of the loveliest town in Eire? To us!”
There was an antic uproar of comment on this, cut across when the front doorflaps burst wide and Finn’s wife, who rarely visited the sty, stepped in, glared around, and snapped:
“Funeral’s in an hour!”
“An hour?” cried Finn. “Why, he’s only just cold—”
“Noon’s the time,” said the wife, growing taller the more she looked at this dreadful tribe. “The Doc and the priest have just come from the place. Quick funeral was His Lordship’s will. ‘Uncivilized,’ said Father Kelly, ‘and no hole dug.’ ‘But there is!’ said the Doc. ‘Hanrahan was supposed to die yesterday but took on a fit of mean and survived the night. I treated and treated him, but the man persists! Meanwhile, there’s his hole, unfilled. Kilgotten can have it, dirt and headstone.’ All’s invited. Move your bums!”
The double-wing doors whiffled shut. The mystic woman was gone.
“A funeral!” cried Doone, prepared to sprint.
“No!” Finn beamed. “Get out. Pub’s closed. A wake!”
I followed them, glad to be silent myself.
“Even Christ,” gasped Doone, mopping the sweat from his brow, “wouldn’t climb down off the cross to walk on a day like this.”
“The heat,” said Mulligan, “is intolerable.”
Coats off, they trudged up the hill, past the Kilgotten gatehouse, to encounter the town priest, Father Padraic Kelly, doing the same. He had all but his collar off, and was beet-faced in the bargain.
“It’s hell’s own day,” he agreed. “None of us will keep!”
“Why all the rush?” said Finn, matching fiery stride for stride with the holy man. “I smell a rat. What’s up?”
“Aye,” said the priest. “There was a secret codicil in the will—”
“I knew it!” said Finn.
“What?” asked the crowd, fermenting close behind in the sun.
“It would have caused a riot if it got out,” was all Father Kelly would say, his eyes on the graveyard gates. “You’ll find out at the penultimate moment.”
“Is that the moment before or the moment after the end, Father?” asked Doone innocently.
“Ah, you’re so dumb you’re pitiful.” The priest sighed. “Get your ass through that gate. Don’t fall in the hole!”
Doone did just that. The others followed, their faces assuming a darker tone as they passed through. The sun, as if to observe this, moved behind a cloud, and a sweet breeze came up for some moment of relief.
“There’s the hole.” The priest nodded. “Line up on both sides of the path, for God’s sake, and fix your ties, if you have some, and check your flies, above all. Let’s run a nice show for Kilgotten, and here he comes!”
And here, indeed, came Lord Kilgotten, in a box carried on the planks of one of his farm wagons, a simple good soul, to be sure, and behind that wagon, a procession of other vehicles, cars and trucks that stretched half down the hill in the now once more piercing light.
“What a parade,” I said, but no one heard.
“I never seen the like!” cried Doone.
“Shut up,” said the priest politely.
“My God,” said Finn. “Do you see the coffin?”
“We see, Finn, we see!” gasped all.
For the coffin, trundling by, was beautifully wrought, finely nailed together with silver and gold nails, but the special strange wood of it …?
Plankings from wine crates, staves from boxes that had sailed from France, only to collide and sink in Lord Kilgotten s cellars!
A storm of exhalations swept the men from Finn’s pub. They toppled on their heels. They seized each other’s elbows.
“You know the words, Yank,” whispered Doone. “Tell us the names!”
I eyed the coffin made of vintage shipping crates and at last exhaled:
“Good lord! There’s Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Château Lafite Rothschild! Upside down, that label, Le Corton! Downside up: La Lagune! What style,
