Free Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show by Frank Delaney Page B

had very bad repercussions
.
    One day, the boy and his father were mucking out the pigsty and the father said to the boy, “These two will soon be ready for the table.”
    The boy said, “What does that mean?”
    The father said, “It means the same as it always meant. We’re going to kill them and eat them.”
    Now Betty and Buster understood exactly what he’d said, because of course they now spoke English, and Buster said out loud, “Oh, no, I don’t want to be killed.”
    “Who said that?” said the father, turning around in great surprise
.
    “I did,” said my friend, quick as a wink, and he went over to Buster, squatted down beside him, whispered, “Say it again,” and when Buster said it again the boy moved his lips
.
    “How did you do that?” said the father, amazed out of his head
.
    “I read about it,” said my friend. “They call it throwing your voice. Vent—something.”
    And thereafter, if one of the animals spoke in English, the boy pretended it was him, and he had them all warned not to say a word in English unless he was nearby
.
    “Did they kill the pigs?” Venetia asked.
    “No, that’s the thing,” said King Kelly. “The father was so amazed that he invited people over, and he made bets with them that the pigs could talk. And he won all his bets.”
    Venetia remembered how the room exhaled when the story ended. Then she made King Kelly reach for the box. He opened it and took out a big doll.
    “Now,” he said to Venetia, “I’m going to show you how to teach this doll to talk.”
    He had brought her a gift almost as big as herself, a ventriloquist’s doll or dummy, and it wore dungarees and a plaid shirt. It looked like an Irish farmer—to be more accurate, it looked like the American doll manufacturer’s impression of an Irish farmer.
    “We have to give the doll a name; he can’t go ’round the place without a name,” said King Kelly. “What’ll we call him?”
    Quick as a flash, tongue sharpened to a point, Venetia said, “There’s only one name for him.”
    They all looked at her, and she said, “Blarney.”

A nd what of my own parents at this time? While the Kellys were climbing into their firmament, where did my family stand in the world? What comparison could I make that would connect us?
    Nothing. Nothing at all. Each of them had lived among people whom their people had always known; other Irish farmers and their farm laborers and their countryside society never touched anything like the wilder lives I’m describing.
    When Venetia Kelly was born, on the first day of the new century, Mother was eighteen—as was my father; they’d been born a few months apart in 1882. Harry MacCarthy, my compelling father, had finished school at seventeen, and was just about to read for a liberal arts degree in Dublin when a stroke killed his father. The farm at that time didn’t generate enough money to hire a manager, so Harry, bright, sparky, and keen to be a man of the world, had to stay at home and run the place for his mother, my grandmother.
    As for Mother—she’d always wanted to be a farmer’s wife, which wasn’t what her family wanted at all. They’d hoped, given some of the Hopkins family connections, that she’d marry a public figure, such as a judge who came from a good family, or a young man who would inheritcommerce, shipping, or banking—because although she was shy, she certainly had enough by way of looks and quiet style to land such a catch.
    Mother, however, showed little interest in much beyond her cows—and other animals, and harvests, and all farm and country things, and she went through her young life as shy as a maiden, unsocial and living at home, without as much as a suitor or a swain, until Harry, with the red hair, and the polka-dot pocket handkerchief, and the merry grin, and the slight speech hesitation and three hundred acres, dropped by in 1910, when she too was twenty-eight years old. Everything, it seems, happened in 1910. Until