The Matchmaker of Kenmare

The Matchmaker of Kenmare

Delaney: THE MATCHMAKER OF KENMARE

1

The Matchmaker of Kenmare taught me much of what I know.

“If a giraffe isn’t weaned right,” she said once, “you’ll have to provide twenty gallons of fresh milk for it every day.”

Another morning she told me, “If you’re going out in the rain, always butter your boots. It makes them waterproof.”

She knew a terrific card trick, but she refused to teach it to me. “Big hands are for power,” she said, “not trickery.”

At our very first meeting she asked, “How can you tell whether an egg is fresh?”

If it doesn’t bounce when you drop it? In those days, I had a sardonic inner voice, my only defense mechanism.

She said, “Put it in a pan of cold water with salt, and if the egg rises to the surface it’s bad.”

You must have seen a lot of bad eggs, said my secret voice. I think I was afraid of her then.

She went on, “If you’re hard-boiling an egg, a pinch of salt in the water will stop it cracking.”

A pinch of salt, indeed.

“If you ever want to catch a bird,” she said, “just sprinkle salt on its tail.”

How useful. You just have to get close enough.

“Not too much salt,” she added.

Does it depend on the size of the bird?

Could she hear what I was thinking? “But don’t do it,” she said, “with an ostrich. Ostriches hate salt.”

Hoping to sound tactful, I asked, “Are there ostriches here in Kerry?”

“Ah, use your imagination,” she said. “They’re around here all right. But you have to know where to look for them.”

I nodded, in confusion more than agreement.

“Do you have a strong imagination, Ben?”

“I do,” I said, “but I’m not sure that I trust it.”

“There are only two words,” she said, “in which I put my trust. Magic and Faith.”

Some of her grip on me came from the conflict of opposites. Whereas I had always leaned toward the scholarly, she belonged to the demotic. For every line of Horace and Virgil that I savored, she had a snatch of cant, and from the moment we met I began to note many of her sayings and old saws. They still addle my brain; this morning, as I sat down to work, I remembered a fragment from a spelling game that she’d learned as a child: “Mrs. D. Mrs. I. Mrs. F-F-I. Mrs. C. Mrs. U. Mrs. L-T-Y.”

Excerpted from The Matchmaker of Kenmare by Frank Delaney. Copyright © 2011 by Frank Delaney. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.