There's a kind of tourist you can spot from across the bar before they've said a word. Bag too big for a pub. Phone out, not filming, just held — like a comfort thing. Sitting at the edge of the snug with a half-pint they ordered because everyone else had one, not because they wanted it. Looking around at us the way you'd look at a fire you weren't sure you were allowed to sit near.
She was American. Boston, it turned out, though I'd guessed nearer to New York and got told off for it later, fairly. Late fifties, maybe sixty. On her own, which is the part that stayed with me, because most of the visitors come in pairs or in those terrible coach-tour clumps of nine. She came in by herself on a Tuesday, which is a brave thing to do, and she sat down and she waited, and I don't think she even knew what she was waiting for.
And then we started the Bog.
Now I want to be honest about the night so you get it right in your head. It wasn't a big session. Tuesdays never are. There was myself, Mick, the two Galway lads who've started coming down, festival_fiddle_fiona if you know her from the forum, and a couple of regulars whose names you'd not know. Maybe nine of us. We weren't doing anything special. Mick had been on about the eleventh verse again, God help us, and to shut him up I just kicked the whole thing off. The bog. The bog down in the valley-o.
I saw her go before we'd even reached the tree.
Not a sob. Her face just — collapsed isn't the word, because it's too violent. It folded. Quietly. Her hand went up to her mouth and she sat there with the tears running and she did not wipe them, which I've thought about since, because most people wipe. She just let them go down her face while she stared at us like we'd walked out of a photograph.
We kept singing. That was the right thing, I'm fairly sure of it now, though in the moment I wasn't sure of anything. You don't stop a session because someone's crying — half the point of the song is that it holds you up while you fall apart, it doesn't need you to be grand. So we built the whole thing, all the way up the twig and back down, the nine of us hauling it out of the floor of a near-empty pub on a wet Tuesday, and when it landed she put both hands flat on the table like she was steadying herself on a boat.
Mick, of all the unsentimental men in Ireland, was the one who went over.
He sat down beside her, didn't say much, slid his pint a small bit toward her in that way men do when they don't have words and offer you a drink instead. And after a minute she told us. Her grandfather. Clare man, gone to Boston in the fifties, the way half of Clare went to Boston. He used to sing the Rattlin' Bog to her when she was small — not from a record, not the Clancys' version, his OWN version, the one his own mother sang him in a cottage outside Kilrush before he ever saw a boat. She said he'd do all the verses and get faster and faster and she'd be screaming laughing. He died when she was eleven. And she said — and this is the part that got ME, I'll admit it — she said she'd not heard the song sung by a room of people in fifty years. Fifty YEARS. She'd half convinced herself she'd made it up. That it was a thing only her grandfather had, a private nonsense between the two of them, and that the rest of the world had no idea.
And then she walked into a pub in Ennis on a Tuesday and nine strangers sang the exact thing.
Imagine that. Imagine carrying a song in you for fifty years, thinking it died with the one man who sang it to you, and then a roomful of people you've never met haul it up out of the floor like it never went anywhere. Because it never did. That's the whole thing about these songs, the thing I keep failing to say properly on this site for twenty-four years. They're not yours. They were never yours. Your grandfather didn't own it and you don't own it and I don't own it. It belongs to the room. It belongs to whoever's singing it next. He didn't take it to Boston and lose it — he just left it here, with the rest of us, and it kept on going without him.
We sang her a few more. Mick did Spancil Hill, which is a Clare song and felt right, and you could see her mouthing along to bits of it that she didn't know she still had. Fiona played something soft on the fiddle. We didn't make a fuss of her after the first bit, because the worst thing you can do with a person's private grief is turn it into a spectacle, but we kept her in the warm of it, you know? We pulled her chair in. She wasn't at the edge of the fire anymore. She was at the fire.
She stayed till closing. Bought a round she absolutely did not need to buy. Wrote her grandfather's name and the name of his townland on a beermat and gave it to me, and I have it still, on the windowsill, under the cat. I'm not going to put the name here because it's hers, not mine to spread around. But I think about it.
If you've ever stood in a pub far from home and heard a thing your dead came from, you know. And if your people went — to Boston, to Sydney, to wherever the boats went — and you've a half-remembered song rattling around in you that you think you invented, I'll tell you now: you didn't invent it. It's real, and it's in the lyrics, most likely, in some shape, and there's a room somewhere still singing it. There always is.
Come home and hear it sometime. We'll pull your chair in.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin' the cat sat on her lap for the last hour and would not move, and she said her grandfather had a ginger cat in Kilrush called the same name. Which is gas, and a coincidence, and I'm leaving it at that. Don't @ me.