The Last Storyteller by Frank Delaney Read Free Book Online

my hand on his shoulder, waiting as long as it took. On the far wall hung a Randall Duff masterpiece: large, unframed canvas; chalk-gray ground; a great, glistening salmon, its pink as faint as a dream. What dominated the painting? The fish’s eye.
    I looked back to Randall. The unhurt eye had fixed on me. He nodded.
    “Good,” I said. “Take a deep breath.”
    He inhaled like a giant. As though handling a baby, I pressed the towel down on the general area of the closed eye. I held it there, soft as snow, for ten, maybe twenty seconds, maybe hours. When I took it away, he fluttered the eyelash. The eye opened. No shattered lens, no dreaded whiteout, not even redness. Tears, though—a good sign.
    “How does it feel?” I asked, and Randall winked the eye.
    He sat there for a few minutes more. A tableau began to form. Jimmy Bermingham arrived at last and walked to Randall’s chair. Elma Sloane remained in the doorway, pinched and cold, arms folded tight to her young bosom, like a woman just come in from the harsh world. Annette appeared with a book-sized slab of marble in her hand.
    “Dead cold,” she said. “Press it to your forehead. It’ll stop the bruising.”
    Elma Sloane said, “That was my uncle threw the stone. Everybody knows about him—he did jail for manslaughter. He killed a fellow with a brick he threw.”
    The tableau froze.

17
    On that same afternoon of broken glass, the following incident took place more than a hundred miles to the north. Since two of the perpetrators are still alive, I’ll change the location’s name and call it “Brookbridge.”
    In weak sunlight after rain, a twenty-year-old man was repairing his tractor on a roadside. Three other men in a black van drove by. They stopped; they were wearing police uniforms; they marched back to the young farmer. He looked up from his engine, then stood erect; he had a screwdriver in his hand. Without a greeting they grabbed his hair, pushed him back against the tractor, and took the screwdriver. (Years later, one of the trio, having found God, told his conscience-stricken story to a journalist—who refused to testify.)
    The first policeman tugged out clumps of the young farmer’s hair and drew blood. The second man reached down, grabbed the young farmer by the crotch, and iron-gripped, then twisted the testicles. Nobody spoke; the young farmer screamed, but he was half a mile from the nearest house, his own home.
    They marched him—his name was Joseph McConnell—to the van and threw him in the back, where one sat on his face. The others climbed into the front, and they drove the van in the direction of the Brookbridge police station. On the way, however, Joseph McConnell began to scream as nobody had ever heard a man scream before. They stopped the van, the men in front climbed out, and one opened the rear door.
    “What’s after happening?” they asked their comrade. He held up his hands—covered in blood.
    “Bastard bit me.”
    Not the whole truth, as the volume of blood suggested. The policeman (whom we shall call Sammy) had knelt on Joseph McConnell’s throat and gouged out Joseph McConnell’s left eye with Joseph McConnell’s own screwdriver. Apparently Sammy said with a grin, “Like the stone out of a plum.”
    The other two scowled.
    “This is a right mess, like,” said their sergeant.
    To which the third man said, “I know how to fix it.”
    “You’ll never put back an eye.”
    The third man shook his head. “Haul him out here.”
    They stood Joseph McConnell against a tree, blood a dark torrent on his fresh young face, his eye easing loose. From a few feet away, aiming at his profile, the third man fired a shotgun with heavy-caliber cartridges and blasted away his forehead and upper face.
    “Nobody’ll know about the eye now,” said the man with the shotgun.
    “Anyway, didn’t he attack Sammy, like?” said the sergeant.
    “He did so attack me,” said Sammy. “He bit me, didn’t he?”
    They slung the young