The Star of the Sea (19 page)

The following morning before Nicholas awoke, Mulvey walked all the way to the village of Letterfrack, returning with a basket of cabbages and a flitch of bacon, two loaves of fresh bread and a plump broiling chicken. Asked how he had come by the money to purchase such a banquet, Mulvey told his brother he had found a purse on the roadside. Nicholas disapproved of grog-shops and their frequenters, and had pleaded with Pius to stay clear of both.

‘Then you should have taken it up to the constables. It’s after being lost by some unfortunate person. Imagine how he must be feeling now.’

‘I did take it up to them, Nicholas. Isn’t that what I’m after
telling you? The gentleman who lost it left a reward with the constables.’

‘Is that the truth? Look at me, Pius.’

‘As I’m standing here it is. May I choke if it isn’t.’

‘Do you swear to it, Pius? On Mammo and Daddo’s eternal souls?’

‘I do,’ said Pius Mulvey. ‘On their souls, it’s true.’

‘Then God is good, Pius,’ his brother had said. ‘We’d better not question His mercy or it won’t come again. I was after praying for a miracle and here it is.’

And Mulvey had agreed. God was good. The Lord helped those who helped themselves.

I
N WHICH
M
ULVEY BEGINS TO CONSIDER HIMSELF A
GENIUS;
THE FIRST STEP, INVARIABLY, ON THE
R
OAD TO
U
NHAPPINESS
.

Mulvey roved out the following night, to a gathering of musicians at a crossroads dance near Glassillaun. Again he had sung, and had enjoyed the experience, though now for a different set of reasons. Girls seemed to find him attractive when he sang, though he didn’t know why and found such a fact inexplicable. He knew he was ugly, scrawny and feeble, entirely lacking his brother’s muscularity. But they still found him attractive when he stopped singing, and such a development was not to be disregarded.

He never knew what to say to them, these laughing pretty girls. They would crowd around him or ask him to dance. The less he danced, the more they seemed to like him. Having no sister and no woman friend, he had never spoken to a girl for more than two minutes, and was entirely unprepared for having to do so now. And yet they were so beautiful when they talked and laughed, so different to men; so full of lightness. He found some of their thinking strange as the stars, and often they said things for which he simply had no answer. But they seemed to regard his silence as one of mystery rather than reserve. Silence, he learned quickly, was a thing that could work for you, a card that might be played to useful effect, particularly when combined with the willingness to sing. He had the idea they liked gentleness, courtesy, kindness; all the things which men reckoned unmanly. His ugliness was not mentioned, nor his poverty. They did not want to be swept off their feet. They just wanted to be talked to, and listened to when
they
talked. It wasn’t
very hard, especially if you were interested, and if you didn’t want to talk, that sometimes didn’t matter either. In a world of bragging chancers and roaring boys and athletes, there was a certain kind of girl who found reticence restful, and thankfully, that was the kind he liked himself.

He never spent an evening with Nicholas now. As soon as darkness began to fall he would trudge down the boreen and make for freedom. It didn’t really matter which town you went to; someone would be singing or playing for dancers. There would be warmth, light, music and company; something to belong to when you felt so alone.

One night in a shebeen in Tully Cross a little one-eyed troubadour from some kip of a place in Limerick had given a piece of his own devising, a ballad on the cruelty of a local landowner, Lord Merridith, who had stretched a poor spalpeen for stealing a lamb. The song was crude and poorly sung; the singer a runt with no arse to his britches, but the people had howled with appreciation at the end of it and the singer had nodded like an emperor receiving his kowtow. ‘My soul on you, boy,’ one man had wept, approaching the singer and kissing his gnarled hand. ‘That’s the greatest living song was ever composed in Ireland. Usquebaugh Liquor! The purest drop in the house!’

Mulvey began to ponder something that would come to obsess him. Singers were admired by almost everyone; they were annalists, chroniclers, custodians, biographers. In a place where reading was almost unknown they carried the local memory like walking books. Many of them claimed to know five hundred songs; a smaller number knew upwards of a thousand. Without them, Mulvey sometimes felt, nobody would remember anything, and if it wasn’t remembered it hadn’t truly happened. A singer was in the same category as a faith healer or a dowser, as a midwife who could soothe the pain of labour with secret herbs, or a gypsy who could tame ponies merely by talking to them. But those who made their own songs were absolutely revered.

People fell silent when they came into a room, those shabby men and women granted the awesome gift of songmaking; the magistrates of what had happened and what had not. They didn’t even have to sing particularly well. Others would sing the works
they made. Neither did it matter that they rarely devised fresh melodies, that they simply used the ancient ones that everyone knew; wine-makers pouring this year’s blessings into the beautiful bottles of the past. If anything such an approach made them even more admirable. Their wine tasted richer when infused with the spice of antiquity.

It was as though they had been touched by the hand of the Almighty, as though something of God’s own power to conjure perfection out of nothingness had been breathed into their mortal mouths. Merely to be in their presence was regarded all over Connemara as an honour. A new song was greeted like the flowering of a crop; if it was unusually good, like the birth of a child. Often enough they derided each other’s abilities, but nobody else dared to blackguard them. To insult a songmaker was considered evil luck. There was fear in the way these magicians were regarded; if you crossed one you might end up in a song yourself and be left there for ever to have your folly mocked, long after it had ceased to matter.

In his frayed, spineless dictionary Mulvey looked up the English verb ‘to compose’ –
to calm, to produce, to set up printer’s type, to decide what is printed, to write or create, to adjust or settle, to put together
. The man who put together could also take apart. There was nothing such a wizard could not do.

He began to wonder in a quietly excited way if somehow he might include himself in this venerated priesthood, if one day he might fashion a song of his own. Always he had felt that he must have some purpose, that his life must mean something other than vassalage and frostbite. Soon he felt the need start to fume in him like a fever. Rhymes occurred to him often, and always had; he could fit words to melodies as well as the next man. His problem was the great limitation of his experience. He had never been in love or fallen out of it, never fought in a battle, never met a heavenly woman. Nor had he married or courted or killed or spent all his money on whiskey and beer or had
any
of the adventures which people worked into songs. Pius Mulvey had never made anything happen. Knowing what to write about was the hardest thing about writing.

At night while his brother was praying in the back room Mulvey would squat by the meagre fireside and try to compose. But to break open that part of him proved harder than breaking the land. He
hungered to do it but it was so hard to do. Nothing came. For months nothing came.

He felt like a fisherman on a lake of shadows; just about able to glimpse the flit in the depths but able to net nothing no matter how he tried. Ideas darted past him, pictures and similes; he could almost feel them slither through his desperate fingers. In his mind he reached out to the spirit of his mother, the woman who had bequeathed him his love of singing.
‘Help me’
, he prayed. ‘
If you can hear me, help me
.’ Never since her death had he felt so painfully close to her as on the long, taunting nights when he tried to compose. But nothing came. Nothing ever came. Only the skittering of the rats in the thatch and the low fretted whisperings of his brother at prayer.

And then, one morning, everything changed. He awoke from a dream of leaves in a breeze with a couplet forming in his fuddled mind. It had happened just as strangely and as simply as that; like being roused to find a gift on your pillow. As though the leaves of the dream had suddenly fallen away to reveal it sitting there like a drowsy moth.

Myself and my brother were tilling the land,
When up came a sergeant with coins in his hand
.

That he had heard the lyric before was his first conscious thought about it. It was good. He must have heard it before. Quickly he rose from the bed and crossed the cold earth floor to the table. A butterfly of words that might escape. He scribbled them down on the back of an old sugar bag, as though they would fly out the window if he didn’t. He looked at the lines. Really they were very good. They obeyed the first principle of the architecture of balladry: each line moved the story forward.

Myself and my brother were tilling the land,
When up came a sergeant with coins in his hand
.

A loin of steak with not an ounce of fat. Nothing at all about the lines was a waste. All the characters were introduced, their professions noted, their relationship to each other defined. Even the fact that the sergeant was said to have coinage implied that the
narrator and his hard-working brother must not. Suddenly he saw that if you changed ‘tilling’ to ‘scratching’, and the dull noun ‘coins’ to the more sparkling ‘gold’, the fact of their relative poverty might be apprehended more clearly. And if you promoted the lowly sergeant to ‘Corporal’ or ‘Captain’ you would have a pleasing piece of alliteration with the flat verb ‘came’. Hastily he made the alterations and read the result. The lines seemed to burst into life like a fruit.

Myself and my brother were scratching the land,
When up came a captain with gold in his hand
.

Mulvey’s elation felt almost indecent, like the giddiness of a child for remembered joys during a solemn benediction. Already you had an idea of how the song might turn out, but there was drama there too, for you couldn’t be certain. Like all good stories it had choice at its heart. Would they go with the captain or stay where they were? What would you do yourself if you were in their position? Who would be the hero and who the villain? Now it occurred to him that ‘my brother’ might be a little too vague. But ‘Nicholas’ was too long to be made to fit. As though riffling the pages of a brick-thick book, he allowed himself to scan the names of all the men he knew. Who had a name that would fit the same space as ‘my brother’? What about John Furey, the farmer from Rosaveel? Mulvey had only met him twice, and had certainly never scratched or scraped alongside him, but his name had the requisite trio of syllables. He scribbled it down and diedled the new line to himself.

Myself and John Furey were scratching the land
.

No. It wasn’t as good as ‘my brother’. He crossed out the name and returned the line to its original form; and the fleeting candidature for immortality of John Furey from Rosaveel was thereby cancelled for ever.

He walked out to work on the bog that morning as though carrying the light of the world in his head; a flame that might go out if left untended.
Mother, I beg you: don’t take it away
. Silently he prayed the Rosary for the first time in years. He would never sin
again; would never steal, would commit no impurity in private or with another. The Stations would be done every day of his life if only his flame did not flutter out. And later that day while digging with his brother, two more lines had loomed up at him out of nowhere.

And stories of soldiers all fearless and grand;
Oh, the day being cheerful and charming
.

Again he was terrified he might forget them. He scratched them into the blade of his loy in case they slipped back into the nothingness later. He knelt by the roots of a fallen bog oak and wept for his mother and the kindness of God. He wept as he had never wept in his life, not at her deathbed, nor even at her graveside. For her loss; for his own; for all the things he had never told her. When his brother approached to see what was the matter, Mulvey took him in his embrace and cried like a child and told him no man ever had a better brother, and he was sorry for the distance which had come to separate them. His brother stared back at him as though he was mad. Mulvey laughed. He roared with laughter. Danced across the bogland like a mountain goat.