A Story Lately Told Read Online Free Page B

parents rushed out and disengaged Tony from the saddle. He had to go to the hospital in Dublin. Mum told me they didn’t know how bad it was; he was pretty much scraped bald. I made a plaster cast from a mold of one of the seven dwarfs, painted and varnished it with Nurse, and took it to him on a visit there. Tony’s head was wrapped in bandages. I remember feeling separate and distant from him at the hospital, because it was a place that I didn’t know, and it scared me. He was on another level. This big thing had happened to him. It set him apart.
    Betty had bought Waterford, a hunter, for Mum in a sale. She was a coffin head, a tall dull-bay mare with a mind of her own. Mum made valiant efforts to impress Dad, but she got dumped practically every time they rode out. She made forays into the hunting field, always immaculately dressed, with a bowler hat on her head and her ballet toes pointed outward. At the first wall she and Waterford came across, the horse would refuse, and Mum would come tumbling down. She broke herwrist in one fall. But as Dad later told the story, one day, stunningly, Waterford cleared all the jumps. My mother had lasted through the hunt. It was a triumph. The fifty-odd riders were clattering back down the boreens, the back roads, until they came to a farm and somebody opened a gate to a pigsty. All of a sudden, Dad looked to the left and saw that Waterford was slowly plunging her feet back and forth in the muck. He said, “Ricki. Pull her up!” But of course, it was too late. Waterford went down. All the way. And started to roll. My mother disappeared momentarily from view. When she stood up, she was covered in pig shit from head to toe, nothing visible but her eyes. That was the last time Mum ever hunted.
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    We were in a plane, flying over turquoise water, on our way to visit Dad in Tobago, where he was filming Heaven Knows, Mister Allison. His home there was a two-story house that stood alone on a pale gold beach, with high palm trees all around that the native boys climbed to cut down coconuts. In the mornings we awakened to the smell of bacon frying on an open barbecue. Every Saturday evening outside the house, a party would gather to cook crab stew in a giant pot and dance the limbo deep into the night, to the rhythm of the island steel drums. Tony and I would dance with them by the firelight and try to pass under the stick without making it fall. I remember an electric eel of a woman who somehow managed to get under no matter how far they lowered it, and everybody would be laughing and singing, their teeth white in the darkness. The air at night was full of fireflies and the same temperature as your skin.
    One morning while we were swimming, it started to rain, a soft shower on a warm sea. When we walked onto the beach, I saw something shining, like painted leopard skin, and pulleda large perfect cowrie shell out of the sand. I got a terrible sunburn in the first week; my milk-white skin was scalded and coming off in ribbons. Dad put me in an ice-cold shower and I screamed with pain.
    A movie starring Deborah Kerr was screened in a theater. Deborah, whom Tony and I had christened “Mrs. Boogum,” and Bob Mitchum were there. Beside their seats on the aisle were tall stand-up placards with their names spelled out in big black letters. She was in a silvery blue dress with her hair up, radiant, like a princess, and everyone was deferential to her. Mitchum was as tall as Dad, deadpan, with dark wavy hair and a pronounced cleft in his chin. They were joking and seemed to be on good terms. Before the movie started, all three stood up and everyone clapped. This was my first taste of what fame looked like.
    One night, Dad took us through the jungle to a big, open building, like a barn. It seemed we were the only white people there. On a raised, ringed-off platform at the center of the floor, two men were boxing. Someone asked Dad to referee the next match. Leaving his seat beside