Read Online Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show by Frank Delaney - Free Book Online

Mother never knew about it, and only at a sharp moment in our relationship did I tell my father that I’d been there.
    The Prizefight took place on a Good Friday. When you grow up alone you learn how to acquire knowledge secretly. If you’re an only child, you think that most of the whispered conversations between your parents are about you. Or so you have to believe in order to survive.
    Thus, at an early age I learned to hide in order to listen. I knew how to skulk around the property, pretending to play my wild and solitary games, but in essence watching everything. The ancient structure of the house, with its nooks and crannies, gave substantial cover. So did the trees and the gardens, and I could spy on people indoors and out, and I did all the time. This continued into my early teens. You learn a great deal about people when you can observe them from hiding. The first thing you learn is that they behave differently when they’re alone and think nobody’s looking.
    Spring had come. We had a late Easter that year and the air had begun to hum and sing. At the top of one section in the home garden, rows of currant bushes, dense as a little green city, ran along the brick walls. When I came into the garden through the gray wooden gate, I saw my father and Ned Ryan, our yard worker, in conversation with another man. As I watched, a rough argument broke out, unusual to see in my life.
    I recognized the other man; he scared me. His name was Thomas Kane—the principal in the next village’s school. A tall, burly man, he’d been a gunman out in the fields during the War of Independence, and had laid some claim to being called a hero. I’ve since learned that he was also considered a bully, and I think I must have known it at the time because I was afraid for my father. Mr. Kane’s pretty wife, a small, brown-eyed woman whom he married some years later, became one of Mother’s “warm acquaintances,” as she called those who hadn’t quite made it into the inner ring of friendship.
    As little Ned Ryan bounced up and down between them trying to make peace, Mr. Kane poked his finger into my father’s chest. Then he rapped his knuckles hard on my father’s head.
    Brushing the hand away, my father whipped off his jacket, a rust-colored Harris Tweed of which I was fond. Ned Ryan took the jacket—and next accepted Mr. Kane’s coat, who then squared off toward my father. And he shouted something that I couldn’t quite hear, though it smacked, I felt, of Billy Moloney’s “flockin’” lingo.
    My father stripped naked to the waist; Mr. Kane didn’t. The two men walked to a small patch of clear and level ground. Ned Ryan followed, fussy as a hen.
    Now my father held up his fists like a pugilist of old, and said something—to which Mr. Kane replied with a punch. It seemed to me that my father allowed the punch to hit him—on the side of the head—and then the fight began in earnest.
    My feelings, I remember, twisted my heart like twine. On the one hand I felt afraid that my father might get hurt; on the other hand I was watching a trial of strength and ferocity between two men of the parish. I didn’t seriously think that my father might lose—or was that just hope?
    The punches flew. Mr. Kane had a longer reach and he jarred my father several times, set him back on his heels. All the birds stopped singing. The dogs lay in the grass, noses down, eyes narrowed, uncomfortable, whining. And the fight swung back and forth along a wide grass path between the vegetable beds.
    I see it all so clearly, still: two big men in their thirties, my father’s torso whiter than dough, and now reddening here and there as punches landed. Mr. Kane had black hair, and eyebrows that met in the middle; the sun caught my father’s wavy red hair.
    It became a brawl. The classy pugilism went out of it when Mr. Kane suddenly delivered a kick. Ned Ryan shouted, “Foul blow, foul blow.”
    The kick was meant for my father’s groin, but he