He grabbed the mug and jerked it to his face. His Adam’s apple bobbed and he did not take down the mug until all the ale was gone.
“And if I wreak too great a damage to that most foul bridge,” he said, “and should those craven trolls go sniveling to authority, you humans will jerk me on the rug to explain my thinking and that is not the way it should be. There is no dignity in the living by the rule and no joy, either, and it was a rotten day when the human race arose.”
“My friend,” said Maxwell, shaken, “you have not said anything like this to me before.”
“Nor to any other human,” said the goblin, “and to all the humans in the world, only to you could I display my feeling. But I, perchance, have run off at the mouth exceedingly.”
“You know well enough,” said Maxwell, “that I’ll not breathe a word of it.”
“Of course not,” said Mr. O’Toole. “That I did not worry on. You be almost one of us. You’re the closest to a goblin that a human can approach.”
“I am honored,” Maxwell told him.
“We are ancient,” said Mr. O’Toole, “more ancient, I must think, than the human mind can wonder. You’re sure you don’t want to polish off that most foul and terrible drink and start another one afresh?”
Maxwell shook his head. “You go ahead and fill your mug up again. I’ll sit here and enjoy mine instead of gulping it.”
Mr. O’Toole made another trip to the cask and came back with a brimming mug, slapped it on the table, and settled himself elaborately and comfortably.
“Long years gone,” he said, shaking his head in sadness, “so awful long ago and then a filthy little primate comes along and spoils it all for us.”
“Long ago,” said Maxwell. “As long as the Jurassic?”
“You speak conundrums. I do not catch the term. But there were many of us and many different kinds and today there be few of us and not all the different kinds. We die out very slowly, but inexorably. A further day will dawn to find no one of us. Then you humans will have it to yourselves.”
“You are overwrought,” Maxwell cautioned him. “You know that’s not what we want. We have gone to much effort…”
“Loving effort?” asked the goblin.
“Yes, I’d even say to much loving effort.”
Weak tears ran down the goblin’s cheeks and he lifted a hairy, calloused hand to wipe them away.
“You must pay me slight attention,” he told Maxwell. “I deep am in the dumps. It’s this business of the Banshee.”
“The Banshee is your friend?” Maxwell asked in some surprise.
“No friend of mine,” said Mr. O’Toole. “He stands on one side the pale and I upon the other. An ancient enemy, but still one of us. One of the really old ones. He hung on better than the others. He dies more stubbornly. The others all are dead. And in days like this, old differences go swiftly down the drain. We could not sit a wake with him, as conscience would decree, but in the absence of this we pay him the small honor of a wake for him. And then these low-crawling trolls without a flake of honor in them-”
“You mean no one, no one here on the reservation, could sit the deathwatch with the Banshee?”
Mr. O’Toole shook his head wearily. “No single one of us. It is to the law contrary, to the old custom in violation. I cannot make you understand-he is outside the pale.”
“But he is all alone.”
“In a thorn bush,” said the goblin, “close beside the hut that was his domicile.”
“A thorn bush?”
“In the thorns,” the goblin said, “dwell magic, in the tree itself…”
He choked and grabbed hastily at the mug and raised it to his mouth. His Adam’s apple bobbed.
Maxwell reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out the photo of the lost Lambert that hung on Nancy Clayton’s wall.
“Mr. O’Toole,” he said, “there’s something I must show you.”
The goblin set down the mug.
“Let me see it, then,” he said. “All this beating amongst the bushes, when there was something that you had.”
He reached for the photo, bending his head to puzzle over it.
“The trolls,” he said, “of course. But these others I do not recognize. As if I should, but fail. There be stories, old, old stories…”
“Oop saw the picture. You know of Oop, of course.”
“The great barbarian who claims to be your friend.”
“He is my friend,” said Maxwell. “And Oop recalls these things. They are old ones from the ancient days.”
“But what magic is called upon to get a picture of them?”
“That I don’t know. That’s a picture of a painting, painted by a man many years ago.”
“By what means…
“I do not know,” said Maxwell. “I think that he was there.”
Mr. O’Toole picked up his mug and saw that it was empty. He tottered to the cask and filled it. He came back with his drink and picked up the photo, looking at it carefully, although somewhat blearily.
“I know not,” he finally said. “There were others of us. Many different ones no longer present. We here are the tail end of a noble population.”
He pushed the photo back across the table. “Mayhaps the Banshee,” he suggested. “The Banshee’s years are beyond all telling.”
“But the Banshee’s dying.”
“That he is,” said Mr. O’Toole, “and an evil day it is and a bitter day for him, with no one to keep the deathwatch.”
He lifted his mug. “Drink up,” he said. “Drink up. Can one drink enough, it may not be so bad.”
Maxwell came around the corner of the tumble-down shack and saw the thorn tree standing to one side of it. There was something strange about the tree. It looked as if a cloud of darkness had settled along its vertical axis, making it appear to have a massive bole, out of which emerged short and slender, thorn-armed twigs. And if what O’Toole had said was true, Maxwell told himself, that dark cloud clustered in the tree must be the dying Banshee.
He walked slowly across the intervening space and stopped a few feet from the tree. The black cloud moved restlessly, like a cloud of slowly roiling smoke.
“You are the Banshee?” Maxwell asked the tree.
“You’ve come too late,” the Banshee said, “if you wish to talk with me.”
“I did not come to talk,” said Maxwell. “I came to sit with you.”
“Sit then,” the Banshee said. “It will not be for long.”
Maxwell sat down upon the ground and pulled his knees up close against his chest. He put his hands down beside him, palms flat against the mat of dry and browning grass. Below him the autumn valley stretched to the far horizon of the hills north of the river-unlike the hills of this southern shore, but gentle, rolling hills that went up toward the sky in slanted, staircase fashion.
A flurry of wings swept across the ridge behind him and a flock of blackbirds went careening through the blue haze that hung against the steep ravine that went plunging downward from the ridge. But except for that single instant of wings beating in the air, there was a soft and gentle silence that held no violence and no threat, a dreaming silence in which the hills stood quiet.
“The others did not come,” the Banshee said. “I thought, at first, they might. For a moment I thought they might forget and come. There need be no distinction among us now. We stand as one, all beaten to the selfsame level. But the old conventions are not broken yet. The old-time customs hold.”
“I talked with the goblins,” Maxwell told him. “They hold a wake for you. The O’Toole is grieving and drinking to blunt the edge of grief.”
“You are not of my people,” the Banshee said. “You intrude upon me. Yet you say you come to sit with me. How does it happen that you do this?”
Maxwell lied. He could do nothing else. He could not, he told himself, tell this dying thing he had come for information.
“I have worked with your people,” he said, “and I’ve become much concerned with them.”
“You are the Maxwell,” said the Banshee. “I have heard of you.”