Every session has one. You know the type. I'm fairly sure you can picture him this second, before I've even described him, because he's the same fella in every pub in Ireland and probably every pub in the world.
He sits at the back. Near the wall, never the bar. Has the one pint and makes it last the whole night, two if it's a long one. Nods along. Taps a finger on his knee, not the table, the knee, so you'd barely notice. Doesn't sing. Doesn't ask for a song. Doesn't talk much either — you'll get a "grand, thanks" out of him and not a syllable more for an hour. And you stop noticing him, the way you stop noticing the coat hooks or the picture of the GAA team from 1987 over the snug.
And then, somewhere near the end, when the loud ones have worn themselves out and the place has gone soft and tired and honest, he opens his mouth.
And the room stops.
I want to tell you about ours. Because Tuesday last we got one, and I haven't stopped thinking about it.
I don't know his name. That's the first thing. He came in on his own, sat where I just told you he'd sit (the wall, near the cold draught that nobody likes, which is exactly why it's free), and he had a pint of plain and he listened. For the guts of three hours he listened. We did the usual — somebody slaughtered Whiskey in the Jar, Fiona did a set of reels that'd lift the roof, young Aoife sang Carrickfergus and made an auld lad by the fire dab his eyes with a bar napkin and pretend it was the smoke (there's no smoke, it's been twenty years). Good night. Class night, even.
And this man at the back said nothing through all of it.
Then it got late. The fiddles went down. And in that gap — you know the gap, the one where everyone's deciding whether to call it or have the one more — he started singing. Quiet. No introduction, no "ah go on then, I'll give ye one." Just started, low, like he was finishing a thought he'd had a long time ago.
It was a verse of the Bog.
But not one I'd heard. Not the standard run we do. The shape was right, the cumulative thing was there, the rhythm of it sat in the bones the way our song does — but the words were turned. There was a creature in it I'd never had in the song. Older language. The kind of phrasing you get in the really old field recordings, where the collector's gone out to some townland in 1911 with a wax cylinder and an umbrella and written down whatever the woman at the hearth gave him.
I've got nearly every version of the lyrics on this site. I've spent — and I am not exaggerating — years on the variants. I did not have this one.
And here's the part that's been at me. He wasn't showing off. There was none of that. He sang the one verse, the whole place gone still, and then he stopped, and he had a sup of his pint, and he nodded a small nod like "there now," and that was it. He let us carry on. Didn't wait for the clap (there was a clap, a big one, the kind that's half applause and half "what in God's name was THAT").
I went over after. Of course I did. I'm me. I sat down beside him and I said something useless like "that was a fierce lovely verse, where'd you get that," and he just smiled and said his grandmother had it, and that there were more, and that we had the song "nearly right." Nearly. NEARLY. From the man who runs the shrine, lads. I'll be honest, that landed somewhere tender.
I asked him would he write it down for me. He said maybe next time.
And then — and I swear this is true, ask anyone who was there, ask Fiona — when I went to get him a pint to say thanks, the seat was empty. Coat gone. Glass left clean and square in the middle of a beermat, like he'd lined it up. Nobody saw him to the door. Now, the door's right there by the back wall, and it was a busy night, and the simplest thing in the world is that a private man slipped out while my back was turned at the bar, which is exactly what a private man does. I'm not saying anything else. I'm really not.
But I'd love to know where the verse came from. And I'd love to know whose grandmother, and what townland, and whether there's a wax cylinder somewhere with the whole of it.
Here's what I actually want to say, though, under all the wondering.
These are the ones who carry it. Not me, with my website and my forty browser tabs. Not the showy singer who takes three songs and an encore. It's the quiet man at the back, the one who gives you nothing all night and then gives you the one thing that matters, the thing he's been keeping safe without making a fuss about keeping it. The song doesn't live in the loud part of the room. It never did. It lives at the back, by the cold draught nobody wants, in the people who'd never tell you they're holding it.
If he comes back, I'll have a stool kept and a pen ready and I'll not pester him. (I'll pester him a little.)
And if he's reading this — and he might be, sure who knows who reads this thing — the seat's yours. The cold one. We'll not give it away.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin sat under that man's chair the entire night, which she does for precisely nobody, not even me, not even when I've ham. Make of that what you will. I'm making nothing of it. I'm going to bed.