This Is Happiness Read online

  ‘Like the Lord,’ Ganga said. He had the kind of smile you couldn’t get around. I couldn’t anyway.

  By the world in general, Mother Acquin was unimpressed. Nuns lived outside the normal calendar of time, many it seemed were of an indeterminate age and, as if by covenant, endured undiminished year after year, but by consequence had witnessed every failing humanity had to offer. By a soul-telegraph employed by the religious, Mother Acquin knew that my vocation had faltered, and, a pale nuncio, she had come now with the intention of stiffening it. Her dark eye sought me out. ‘There you are.’

  ‘Mother Acquin.’ I escaped the scrutiny by turning sideways and saying, ‘This is Christy.’

  ‘Happy Easter, Sister.’

  ‘Mother. And you are?’

  ‘I’m the lodger.’

  ‘The electricity man,’ Ganga said.

  ‘I’m bringing the light,’ Christy said, light-hearted, a tone that was snapped off sharpish as Mother sat in the chair planted in the garden, at once sliding sideways and clutching on to the table as she came face-to-face with Columbus’s incontrovertible truth: not one foot of the parish of Faha was flat.

  With magnified mortification, Doady retreated inside, throwing two beckoning hooks to Ganga at the door before heading in to administer last rites to the lamb.

  I hovered by the table.

  ‘Sit!’

  I sat. Christy sat too.

  Mother Acquin looked me in the eye. ‘Your mother in Heaven sent me,’ she said.

  ‘How is she doing?’ Christy asked.

  It is a dolorous fact that a meal, months in the dreaming, weeks in the planning and days in the preparation, is eaten in minutes. Neither niceties of manners, Mother Acquin’s lengthy Grace Before Meals, nor Ganga’s theatrics with the novelty of a napkin – placing it on one knee so it showed the stitched insignia that suggested the English Admiralty, then on the other knee because the gravy chose that one, before finally wearing it, a stained flag under his chin – delayed the inevitable. Under the full flush of a Floridian sun, the leg of lamb disappeared, along with the roast potatoes, the mashed potatoes, the peas, the carrots, the onions, turnips, God help us parsnips, and a gravy the sun made phosphorescent in its boat, the rainbow dissolving when it met the meat. Because no one actually liked it, its place at the table vouched only by tradition, the exodus of the Israelites and the genteel custom of the eighteenth century, the mint jelly survived.

  Eschewing the native custom of eating in silence, Christy employed a cuisine commentary. Though he ate no lamb he gave out a continuous host of compliments to which Ganga and I added our tuppence, mostly in a form outside vocabulary. There was too much awe for small talk. Perhaps because of the foreignness of Fahaean dining al fresco, because the meal was so outside the usual, there was a sense the feast was a further extension of the Holy Day. Mother Acquin had the signs of it. She ate straight-backed and silent, as though performing a devotion. There was no savour in it. Thankfully, she didn’t begin the lecture I presumed was coming. Eventually I realised she supposed her presence alone would, as they used say, speak volumes. Those volumes were stacking up inside me.

  The sun beat down like the best day of a remembered summer.

  As befitted the occasion, Christy ate with deep relish and high manners, his only lapse using his fork as a spoon when pursuing peas, pushing the last of them on with his finger. Ganga, whose habit was to open his trouser belt after eating, made it halfway before he caught Doady’s glare and turned the unbuckling into a patting.

  The meal was not done yet. We would match the gentry and have a sweet, and call it ‘dessert’ too, according to Ganga. ‘Two desserts,’ he whispered when Doady was gone.

  From the multitude preserved during Lent, an egg custard landed, and, a French inspiration, the planet-like surface of Faha’s only Easter meringue, with a coating of heavy cream and the well-spaced segments of a single orange.

  ‘It’s supposed to look like that,’ Doady said.

  Ganga beamed at his wife as if she was the Eighth Wonder of the World.

  ‘None for me, thank you,’ Mother Acquin said.

  ‘Both, please.’ Christy passed her his plate to pass along.

  Soon enough some of the Clancy children appeared, short-trousered or -skirted, each with the same home-barbering and the crusty badges of skinned knees. From infancy, it seemed, they had learned the tactic of rushing from their own house after dinner and showing up at my grandparents’, a tactic born of the fact that there were twelve of them on two benches, some with longer arms than others, and the time-worn truth that the stomachs of growing children can never be full. Doady had learned this first-hand in Kerry, and although Ganga and Clancy were not on speaking terms since the time years earlier when, in an antic both schoolboy and Greek, Ganga and Bat had kidnapped Clancy’s cock, Doady fed the Clancy children whenever they appeared.

  The sight of them settling in to our Easter leftovers discommoded Mother Acquin, whose driver had been told to return in two hours exactly. But, as had been true since her girlhood, men never materialised, and she sat, high, beaked, and brewing him a scalding. It brewed some more I think when, the Clancys leaving for a third dinner up at Dooley’s, with a hedonist happiness unavailable to humans, Joe made a beast of himself with the lamb bone at the bottom of the garden.

  As though she was a figure inflexibly carved, Mother Acquin adjusted herself squarely to face me. I didn’t hear the bell ring but somehow Ganga and Doady knew a round had been called. Ganga excused himself to attend to the cattle. He pumped her hand and thanked her for joining us. Doady interrupted the pumping by giving him some of the ware to carry in, and more for Christy, all of them withdrawing like figures in a garden play to leave me to my fate.

  ‘You will go back of course.’

  It was a statement, there was to be no disputing.

  ‘You will stay for a time. That is perfectly fine. You will work out of yourself whatever it is that has come into it. But then you will go back and follow your calling and be the person your mother thought you were.’

  Her eyes. Her eyes were Old Testament eyes, grave and grey and allowing not the slightest room for manoeuvre.

  ‘I think my mother would want me—’

  ‘She wants you to devote yourself to God.’

  I don’t believe I came up with any response. I believe some part of me was knocked down unable to speak or think or do anything at all, only hear that phrase boom in my ears.

  That wouldn’t be the only time it would boom.

  I’m not sure anyone speaks this way any more. I’m not sure the idea itself endures, without the association of fanatic, or that, if it does, it can ever emerge out loud into the air, sort of vast and winged and breathtaking.

  Mother Acquin’s driver coughed. He was Heaney, a hackney man. After a liquid lunch in Craven’s, he had found the margins of the roads badly drawn. The motor was one-side mucked. Heaney did the hackney for years and years, continued driving long after his cataracts made imaginary the roads when he drove craned forward to the windscreen, always throwing up a hand in salute moments after he had narrowly missed killing you.

  ‘Time, Mr Heaney,’ Mother Acquin said, giving me a last dose of the eye and sweeping from the table. ‘Time!’

  Heaney had a white puff of Einstein hair. He employed it like a prop that signalled the mystery of things, scratching at it by way of reply. ‘I know, Mother,’ he said ruefully. ‘I was early, until I was late.’

  Heaney gave Einstein a scratch.

  Mother Acquin boarded the motor. The engine roughed the quiet and scattered the hens. Then she was gone.

  In dribs and drabs, people came to make and take prearranged phone calls. One shouted into the receiver while another sat waiting on the stool. There was no privacy in it. Tidying up the table we could hear all, but telephones were not for the private then, letters were, the spoken word still somewhere below the written. Mostly it was voices people wanted to hear. Centuries of storyt
elling had instilled the knowledge that any story of worth took longer than the three minutes the philistines of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs allotted for a phone call, and because to overshoot three minutes incurred an exorbitant expense, callers with something important to tell delivered just the headline and said: I’ll tell you all about it in a letter.

  Waiting to be put through, there was time to pass, but the technology was still recent enough to be a marvel, and it was not resented. Distance was still humanly dimensioned, the country still large, and the miles and miles of wires everyone had seen looping, drooping, across fields and bogs, made visual the miracle of speaking to the invisible.

  Tommy Two Boots Halpin came, walking up the garden with that peculiar high-step of his, that recalled the time when Faha was three-fourths underwater.

  I wasn’t expecting him to get in here, but there he is. He thought his son in Queens might call. He sat waiting, big hands hanging between his legs. He wouldn’t take a bit of the meringue thanks all the same. He didn’t eat much since Mary, he said. He waited an hour, then went home.

  Soon enough I slipped away and went walking by the river. There were some boats on it, the pilots who worked the estuary were off for Easter Sunday and instead, because spring had been skipped and summer had arrived in April, there were a handful of pleasure boats and fine-weather sailors flirting with the wind and the current and the ageless allure of the coast of Kerry. There was freedom in it and some gaiety, I suppose, in the holiday of the sunshine, but I could feel neither.

  It was some time later when Christy came and found me. He didn’t choose an avuncular or advisory approach. He didn’t say You’ve been thinking of your mother, or None of us can escape loss, nor even That nun was a right one. He just appeared in front of me on the riverbank in the wrinkles of his white cotton shirt and blue trousers, pushed flat the jut of his beard, glistened his eyes, and said, ‘Junior Crehan?’

  18

  Now, you may not be able to credit what the music meant in Clare, means still, and what the name Junior Crehan stood for.

  The origins of it are in storytime. They’re in the dust of the roads and the memories of birds. They’re in the bars of the rain, in the floods and the tides, in the salt of the air and the thorns of the ditches.

  Like all stories of music, there are various strings to it.

  Once, there was this child blind from birth, or near enough, and what they did in that time was give the child a set of pipes to play, believing that one sense dead the others awoke, and if he played the pipes he’d have a trade and make his way in the world. And this blind child became a man, Garrett Barry, and he was small, and when grown black-bearded, and by the senses of feeling and hearing travelled the country in and around Miltown and Mullagh and Inagh and south of there too down into Kilmihil, into Kilmurry, and on down into Faha, playing airs and making a living and becoming in his time a small sensation so that his playing stopped what work was being done and made the mark of a different world on that day so that any who heard him recalled it even on to the nodding of their dotage.

  Now this was back in old God’s time. And in that time Garrett visited Casey’s house in Annagh where Tom the Master lived, and Tom had the music and played the timber flute and his son was Thady who had the timing in him and it was said could pick a tune out of the breeze. And though Garrett would die in the Ennistymon workhouse and be buried in an unmarked grave in Inagh, before he did he left the tunes after him so Thady Casey became a dancing master travelling around and teaching the Caledonian and other sets and making step dancers with a twelve-inch rule he struck none too lightly on the calves if the dancers weren’t in the right time and getting off the ground.

  Getting off the ground was an important thing.

  Being in the right time, another.

  The same Thady put buckets and saucepans under the flagstones when he was laying the floor of his house in Annagh so the batter of the dancing would ring. That house is there still, I believe, on the road from the ocean.

  Thady had a cousin Scully and Scully Casey on the fiddle became the mentor to many, one of whom was Junior Crehan.

  Junior was Martin, but his father was Martin too and Martin Senior lived past ninety years so Junior stayed Junior. Once he heard a tune it never left him, they said. There were players everywhere in the townlands around him in Ballymackea in the parish of Mullagh. It was common to hear music played in the evenings, and he went out nights to play the fiddle at house dances far and wide, hiding his pyjamas in the barn so he could sneak in home at dawn, escape the look of Senior and snatch the small sleep of the raptured, the reels still spinning in his head.

  And because the music was not written down, because it lived in the air in the moments of its playing, and then in that place between the fingers and the memory, the players were its custodians. In time Junior Crehan carried so much music in him he became a one-man repository, both modest and legendary, a walking encyclopaedia of tunes, dances, airs and stories, in whose playing was the playing of all those before him on into the mists of the long ago.

  There were other strings. There was another dancing master Pat Barron whose father was a dancing master who had left the house one day to go playing and teaching and came back another day an old man. And Pat said to his father he’d like to go on the same job. But the father had pawned the fiddle before he came home and so he told the son where and the first thing Pat did was go and get that fiddle and that was the one he took on the road. He used to sing, dance and play fiddle all over. He played ‘Top of Cork Road’ and ‘The Priest in his Boots’ and ‘Miss McLeod’s’ and many times he came into Clare, he came to fair and market days and horse races and football matches, he came to Fanny O Dea’s in Lissycasey, played in Faha, played in what later became Mrs Crotty’s on the square in Kilrush, he came to Miltown and played for a man Gilbert Clancy who was the father of Willie and who said the pipes recalled what couldn’t be remembered, the old bard times, and in their melancholy and joy was this world and another.

  And because Clare was the place for music, the travelling piper Johnny Doran got up on his caravan and travelled out of Dublin and came the way and parked near Miltown, and he was the one Willie Clancy heard when Johnny set up playing, standing up, at the races on Spanish Point beach, the box under one foot. And all that afternoon, evening and night Johnny played and gave a wonderful exhibition of music that passed into legend so that the whole populations of Miltown and Mullagh and Cree and as far south as Faha said they were there. And, years later, on Johnny’s last day in this world, Willie came to visit him in his hospital bed in Dublin and they recalled that day and Willie took out the pipes and squeezed the bag for Johnny’s fingers to play.

  That Willie Clancy lived not five miles from Junior Crehan was neither coincidence nor design. It was in the air is my point. The music was a feature of the landscape and as such not pass-remarkable. There were many fine players, most of whose names were unknown. It would be years before I would realise that I had heard Elizabeth Markham who became Mrs Crotty play. I heard Micho Russell, and Tom McCarthy, Micko Dick Murphy, John Joe Russell, Peggy Healy, Solus Lillis from Kilmacduane, Nellie Fox, the Neylons, Timmy Tom and Tony, The Captain, Manus, Cissie, Josie, a world of them, and I saw the set dancing Penders in Galvins of Moyasta when the air was thick with smoke and loud with battering and the entire place rose, holus-bolus, six inches off the ground.

  Although we didn’t know it then, that summer, a young man, Ciaran MacMathuna, would roll down from Dublin to Clare, to call to houses, to step inside back doorways into flagged kitchens with open hearths and no electricity, and with the help of the country’s first mobile recording unit start to record the players. He’d be received with the venerable courtesies of country people, cups of tea that hills of sugar couldn’t sweeten, cuts of ham and griddle bread. He would put on a stone that summer, he’d say, because each time he would be feasted before he could get around to requesting a tune. And then, with the natur
al bashfulness of those who in the purest sense were amateur and believed there were better players elsewhere that he should be recording, aware that they were carriers of a tradition that was passing through them, but reserved and absent in vanity, they would be coaxed an hour, two sometimes, but at last, in the dim light of their kitchens and parlours, play. And in that playing another time would be summoned, the time of dancing masters and travelling pipers, because in it was a threshold, across which it was still possible to pass and be at the races on the sands at Spanish Point or the fair days and football matches along roads and across fields and time and still be where, in the playing now of Junior Crehan and the like, was recalled the soul of a people, the pulse of a place, and a hundred years of music.

  To hear Junior play, Christy and I took the bicycles in the fall of dark. A small thing will feed a lover, and the thought that Annie Mooney had recognised him in the church that morning was enough to keep Christy’s heart high and his eyes glossed. He was a chronic optimist and, as I would discover, a pathologic romantic. That he added to this an old man’s affliction of sentiment, I can’t blame him. We spend most of our lives guarding against washes of feeling, I’m guarding no more.

  The thing about music in Clare was that its location was always unknown. There were not set venues or session times as such. Places garnered reputations because of music that had sprung up one evening, and become in memory legendary, but you could as easily arrive in the door of the same place to see three men sitting in a dim silence and, as if it was somehow vaguely your fault, be told by the barman You should have heard the music that was here last week.

  Without specific destination, but the knowledge that the heartland of the music was north of Kilmihil and south of Miltown, we pushed the bicycles out of Faha along roads hard and curved like bones in the moonlight. We could see a silvered way and the gleaming of figures well ahead of their actuality. In the bounty of his good humour, Christy saluted all, inspiring by surprise a good number of salutes back and many a Fine evening, thank God. In the balmy dark there was a sense of holiday and, after the privations of Lent, something of a people unshackled.