Once she escaped, she traveled the world. She’d gazed on the statue where Saint Kelly had carved the face of God after seeing his vision at Gort Ard, and as she described the statue, neither male nor female, old nor young, she cried at the remembered beauty of it.
She told how she had wandered for days at the Palace of the Conqueror near Droichead Bo, never twice entering the same room, and there she found a small hoard of emeralds that had been overlooked by treasure hunters for two hundred years.
Gallen quit listening, turned back to the kittens. Between his breathing on them and poking them, the kittens soon woke. He watched them stretch and search for their mother’s nipples; then he began playing with them, hoping that since he could not make a choice, perhaps one of the kittens would choose him. But the kittens were not used to small boys, so they ran about the house frolicking with one another.
One kitten in particular caught Gallen’s eye: the orange-and-white one would glance into a shadowed nook and hiss as if it had seen a ghost, then it would leap up the couch, climbing as if a wolf nipped at its tail, then it would prance along the spine of the couch with all of its hackles raised, its back arched. When Gallen wiggled his finger, the kitten became all eyes and crouched to stalk for the attack.
Despite the kitten’s playfulness, Gallen wasn’t sure he wanted it: the widow had fed the cats a fish, and its breath smelled bad. A bright calico with blue eyes caught Gallen’s fancy. When it became clear that he’d never be able to choose, the widow bent her wrinkled face close and said the thing that saved Gallen’s life, “Take the orange one that plays so much. He’ll live longest.”
“How do you know?” Gallen asked, frightened, wondering if the widow really was a witch and somehow knew the future.
“Clere is a big town,” she said, “with tough old tomcats living on the wharf, and hounds on every corner, and many a horse riding through that could crush a cat. But that orange tom can handle life in a dangerous town. Look at the way he practices the skills he’ll need in life. He’ll do well.”
Gallen grabbed the orange kitten in his stubby fingers. The kitten nuzzled into his woollen jacket, and the Widow Ryan continued, “You can learn a lot from that kitten, child. There are many kinds of people in this world. Some live only in the present-moving through life from day to day without a thought for tomorrow or a backward glance. They live only one life. For these people, life is a dream.
“Another kind of person lives in the moment but has a long memory, too. These people often fester under the weight of old slights or bask in triumphs so time-worn that no one wants to hear of them. For these people, the walking dream is spiced with a past that they can’t escape. “Then there is a third kind of person, a person like your cat. This person lives three lives. Such people don’t just muck about in the past or drift through the present, they dream of tomorrows and prepare for the worst and struggle to make the world better.
“This orange kitten, he’ll likely never get crushed by a wagon or be eaten by a dog, because he’s faced all those dangers here.” She pointed a crooked finger to her head.
Gallen took the orange kitten. Sure enough, within six months the others in the litter had been tragically massacred by dogs or crushed under carts or thrown into the ocean by mean-spirited boys. But not Gallen’s orange tom. It died of old age years later, and by that time Gallen had learned all that the cat could teach.
As a boy, Gallen lived three lives, but by far the life of his imagination was the fullest. Like the cat, he imagined every possible danger and worked to avert it, and like his cat, he was a rangy lad.
So one summer night when he was seventeen, he surprised himself when he and a neighbor named Mack O’Mally were accosted by two highwaymen on a dark road. Both robbers wore loose black flour sacks to cover their faces. The robbers attacked from behind, and just as one was about to plunge a knife into Mack, a screech owl called out. This distracted the felon, making him turn his head. Gallen noticed the small peepholes the robbers had burned into the sack, and realized the sacks must be mighty inconvenient to see out of. So he snatched both flour sacks, turning them so that the robbers were blinded, then he pulled Mack from their grasp. Within five seconds, he had both highwaymen gutted on the ground.
Gallen and Mack made five pounds and three shillings when they rifled the murderers’ pockets, and when they got back to Clere, they went straight to the alehouse and bought everyone a round and gave the change to an undertaker to dig a hole for the dead robbers.
In a sense, that was the beginning of the legendary “fantasist” Gallen O’Day, but that’s a far cry from the end of his tale.
No, I suppose that if one were to tell it right-and it’s a tale that demands to be told in whole-one would have to continue the story two years later. Gallen had been down south for a year building a name for himself. He had taken up a friendship with a black bear named Orick, and together the two worked as bodyguards for wealthy travelers. In those days, the family clans were strong, and it was hard for a merchant to make a living when the O’Briens hated the Hennesseys and the Hennesseys hated the Greens. An unarmed traveler could hardly ride a dozen miles without someone trying to bloody his nose. But there were worse things in the land.
Rumor said that Gallen himself had rid the countryside of two dozen assorted highwaymen, cutthroats, and roadside bandits. In fact, every highwayman in six counties had learned better than to accost the dreamy-eyed lad with the long golden hair. He was building a grand reputation. But that fall, Gallen got word that his father had died, and he returned home to Clere to care for his aging mother.
So it was, that one night.…
An autumn storm kept the rain rapping at the windows like an anxious neighbor as Gallen sat in Mahoney’s alehouse with his friend Orick the bear, and as Gallen listened to the rain knocking the glass, he had the unsettling feeling that something was trying to get in, something as vast and dark as the storm.
Gallen had come to the inn tonight hoping to ply his trade as a bodyguard, but even though the inn was full of travelers and the roads around Clere were rumored to be thick with robbers, no one had approached him. Not until Gallen caught the eye of a fellow at another table, a prosperous sheep farmer he knew from An Cochan named Seamus O’Connor.
Seamus raised a bushy brow from across the room, as if asking Gallen for permission to sit at his table. Gallen nodded, and Seamus got up and tamped some tobacco into a rosewood pipe, went to the fire and removed a coal with some tongs, then lit his pipe. Father Heany, the local priest, came over to borrow use of the coal.
Seamus sat across from Gallen, leaned back in the old hickory chair, set his black boots on the table and sucked at his pipe, with his full stomach bulging up over his belt. He smiled, and at that moment Gallen thought Seamus looked like nothing more than a pleasant fat gut with a couple of limbs and a head attached. Father Heany came over in his severe black frock, all gaunt and starved looking, and sat down next to Seamus with his own pipe, sucking hard to nurse some damp tobacco into flame. Father Heany was such a tidy and proper man that folks in town often joked of him, “Why the man is so clean, if you took a bath with him, you could use him for soap.”