I want to tell you about a night that I have never properly told anyone about. Not the whole of it. I've alluded to it. I've mentioned Mick Hennessy plenty on this shrine over the years. But I've never sat down and told you about the night his fingers bled and he kept playing.
It was a long time ago now. Late 90s. There was an old fiddler in our area named Tom — I won't give his surname, his family is still around and they're private people — and Tom had died that week. Cancer. Quick at the end, the way it sometimes is. He'd been one of the men who taught Mick. Taught him bowing, taught him patience, taught him that you don't rush a slow air just because the pub's getting loud.
So the session at Cruise's that Friday was a memorial. Nobody called it that. There were no speeches. That's not how it goes. But everyone knew.
And Mick played.
I have to be honest with you here. I was a younger man then and I didn't fully understand what I was watching. I thought I did. I thought, ah, this is grand, this is fierce playing, look at Mick go. But I was watching it the way you watch fireworks — impressed, entertained, missing the entire point.
Mick started slow. He always starts slow. He'll pick at a tune like he's not sure he remembers it, and then it just sort of arrives, fully formed, and you wonder how you ever thought he was unsure. That night he went through the old stuff first. The airs. The ones Tom loved. There's a thing fiddlers do where they bend a note right at the edge of where it'd go sour, and hold it there, and you feel it in your chest like a hand pressing down. Mick did that for about an hour and the pub went quiet in a way pubs almost never go quiet.
Then somebody — I genuinely don't remember who — called for something with life in it. And Mick looked up, and he started into a set of reels, and that's when it changed.
I have never seen a man play like that. Before or since.
It wasn't fast for the sake of fast. Anyone can play fast. It was that he wasn't holding ANYTHING back. There was no part of him kept in reserve. He played the way you'd run into a burning house. The bow was a blur. The boys on the bodhrán and the box were hanging on, grinning, terrified, trying to keep up. People were stamping. A pint went over and nobody mopped it. And Mick's eyes were shut and his jaw was set and he was somewhere else entirely, somewhere the rest of us couldn't follow.
He'd been playing for hours by then. And here's the thing about fiddle — your fingertips take it. The strings cut. Most players have callouses like leather, but even leather wears through if you push hard enough for long enough.
I noticed it because of the strings. There was a darkness on them near the neck that I couldn't place at first. And then I realized.
He'd worn through. The skin on his fingertips had split. He was bleeding onto the strings and it was getting on the body of the fiddle, this fierce old fiddle his own father had played, and he did NOT stop. I don't think he even felt it. I think he was somewhere past feeling it.
A few of us saw it the same moment. There was a look that went round the table — should we say something, should we stop him. And TradSessionKing was there, younger then too, and he caught my eye and he shook his head. Just barely. Leave him.
Because you don't stop a man saying goodbye.
That's what it was. I didn't understand it at the time and it took me years to understand it. He wasn't showing off. He wasn't proving anything to the pub. He was talking to Tom. The only language the two of them ever really had between them was this, the tunes, the bow on the string, and Tom was gone and there was a thing in Mick that had to be SAID and there were no words for it so he said it the only way he could. Until he bled. And then a bit past that.
When it finally ended — and it ended the way those things end, just sort of trailing off into nothing, no big finish — the pub didn't clap. Nobody clapped. That'd have been wrong. Somebody put a fresh pint in front of him and somebody else got a bit of kitchen roll for his hand and Mick just looked at his fingers like he was surprised they belonged to him.
He said one thing. He looked at the blood on the strings and he said, "He'd have hated that. Wasting good rosin." And then he laughed, and it cracked halfway through into something that wasn't a laugh, and that was the closest any of us came to seeing Mick Hennessy cry.
I think about that night a lot. I thought about it when Mick wrote to me all these years later, the handwriting gone shaky now. I think about it whenever the shrine gets a message from someone telling me The Rattlin' Bog carried them through a hard week. Because that's the thing people miss about these songs and these sessions. They look like fun. They ARE fun, mostly. The bog song especially, all that daft cumulative joy, building up the flea on the feather on the bird and on and on.
But underneath the fun there's this other thing. This is where the grief goes. The session is where you carry the people you've lost. You play them back into the room for one night. And if you have to bleed a little to do it, well. Mick would tell you that's a fair price, and he'd be a bit annoyed you were even asking.
The man is not normal. I mean that as the highest compliment I have.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin' was a kitten this happened, obviously, decades before the cat I have now. Don't write in about that. I KNOW he can't be that old. I know. We don't talk about it.