They played another reel together, taking turns skipping through the notes and watching each other’s fingers. And then, as before, they went back to the sadder tunes, the whistle sounding a note of long-lost hope, the fiddle sighing with it, and the pipes lamenting.

  During the second of those, Father Malcolm Henning came into the pub.

  There was some shifting around on the stools and benches at the front near the bar, making a place for the priest to sit. Heads bobbed all around in respectful greeting and, without so much as a word, Eddie Toner, who sold dry goods to the people of Doolin and the whole surrounding area, went round behind the bar to fetch him a pint and not disturb Liam’s playing of the drum.

  The music floated in the air like bitter, wispy smoke—the breathy piping of the whistle, the cry of the strings, the keening of the pipes, the hollow mutter and rumble of the bodhran—music of foundered dreams and sorry partings, music from ages long gone by, tunes to which no man in the place could put a name in either of his languages, Irish or English, but to which all could nod in keeping to a melody known from birth or before.

  When the number was finished, there was some scattered applause and murmurs of approval. The musicians laid down their instruments in deference to the priest, and pints were handed out to them from the bar. Now, with the music stopped and low conversation resumed, some of the oldtimers rose stiffly from their stools and gathered round Father Henning for a quiet chat.

  The pub was cozy already, but someone went to the fire and added more peat and stirred it all up to a sizeable blaze, adding to the warmth of bodies. The place was warm now, snug and closed away from the bleak night outside, filled with the murmurs of familiar voices, in English and in softly lilting Irish, together with the heavy thump of glasses on scarred wood tables, and the sweet and acrid smell of the burning turf cut from the bogs between the hills.

  “Did Father Henning mean anything special,” Jack asked suddenly, “when he came into the house? Do you remember? He said, ‘God save all here.’ I know it’s a traditional expression, but I wonder if he meant something by it.”

  “I can’t think why he’d mean anything special by it,” Grainne said. “It’s just a thing you say when you enter a person’s home. You’ll not hear much of it in the heathen city, to be sure, but the old ways linger in a place like this, out here in the wild places. Why do you ask? Did you think it had some double meaning?”

  “I was just wondering, that’s all,” Jack said.

  The night air had grown damp and chill, penetrating clothes with sharp-edged icy fingers. Their breath plumed whitely from their mouths in the diffused and dim light of the moon. They had been to the two other pubs of Doolin and heard some of the weekend music in each, but then Grainne had said she wanted to see Nolan’s and try it out. She loved these old country pubs.

  “I’m not so sure you’ll love this one,” Jack had said as they started down the road toward it. “Do you remember Mrs. Mullen’s great hulking son, Michael, this afternoon? The strong, silent type? Well, I was in Nolan’s once, when I first got here, and every last one of them in there looked just like that. I didn’t exactly feel that I’d found the Ireland of a thousand welcomes.”

  “Jack, there’s something terrible troubling you about this place, isn’t there?” She said it slowly and quietly, not as a challenge for him finally to give in and talk with her about it, but as a notice that she understood.

  They had taken ten steps farther along the road before Jack at last said, “Yes.”

  But they said nothing else and in a few minutes more they reached the pub.

  It was crowded now, at a little after ten o’clock, with only an hour or so left to the evening. Liam behind the bar lifted his chin at Jack slightly in what Jack, if he were inclined to be generous, might have taken for a nod of recognition from his one visit before. He got two pints and handed one to Grainne. There was no place to sit, so they pulled their jackets open and remained standing near the bar. Grainne looked perfectly content, but Jack thought the two of them looked like outsiders here, with their city clothes and soft hands and their educated accents.

  “Do you see anyone you know?” she asked him.

  “Nobody.”

  Seamus Curtin, over near the wall, was settling his pipes again for one last tune. They stood and listened to the music, the pipes, the long, slowly-shifting notes floating sadly round their heads.

  When the tune at last wound down to an end, Grainne leaned close to Jack and whispered, “Jack, isn’t that Father Henning? Back there, near the corner? Oh, and see the country-looking lot he’s with! Come on, let’s go talk with him. Come on, let’s. I promise you, in twenty minutes or less, we’ll know everyone in the place.”

  Michael Mullen was drinking beer at the table in the kitchen.

  His brother Patrick sat across from him. He was still on his first bottle and it was only half empty.

  “Will you not come at all, then?” Patrick said again. “Just for a pint or two and a bit of a tune?”

  “Must you always have me to watch over you?” asked Michael. “Are you not able to find your way home from a pub alone? Follow your feet, man, and they’ll bring you here safe, and if they don’t, I’ll make you my solemn oath to comb every ditch and boreen in the morning.”

  “It’s not for you to lead me home that I’m asking. It’s that it’s no good for you sitting here with the drink by yourself.” He pushed his chair back and stood up from the table. “Well, I’m off, then,” he said, “with or without you.”

  He waited but Michael only took another drink from the bottle and replaced it on the table without looking up.

  “You’re a hard one, Michael Mullen,” Patrick said as he finally turned away.

  Peggy Mullen was sitting on the couch in the living room, listening to the whisper of the radio as her knitting needles flew. Patrick said goodnight to her as he took his coat from the peg and shoved his arm into it.

  A minute later, Michael Mullen followed his brother out the door. He closed it quietly, but from the way he walked and held himself, his mother knew he’d really meant to slam it.

  “Give us a tale, Father, will you?” someone said. Others repeated it, saying, “Aye, Father, a tale. It’s not every night that you honor us.”

  The priest demurred briefly but it was all for show and they all knew it. Father Henning was renowned in the region for his tales.

  “Well, then,” he said, “I know a good one, but ’tis as dark in its meaning as it is rich in the telling.”

  “That’ll do,” John MacMahon said suddenly in his hoarse voice, leaning forward and looking closely at the priest where he sat opposite Brian Flynn. “That’s the very sort that’ll do, Father.”

  A few people glanced at the old man and nodded. Grainne secretly dug Jack in the ribs.

  The priest took a mouthful from his glass and then cleared his throat.

  “Well, it’s a tale that starts about an old woman who lived a while ago in the County of Mayo. And it’s about her two sons as well, great fine big lads, the both of them, and faithful to a fault to their dear old mother. I had the tale from the brother of the woman, the uncle to the boys, so I can vouch for its veracity. Now, I’ll not be telling you the name of the village where she lived, for she still has relations alive there and it would bring some pain to them if the story ever came back, and tales have a way of growing and twisting in the telling from one to another.

  “The elder of the two sons, let’s call him Johnny Mac, and the younger by no more than a year, let’s call him Tim. Now there was no man in the house to help in the rearing of the boys, for the woman’s husband, God rest his soul, had been a good man—his name was, let’s say, James—but a bit of a drinker, and one night on his way home he’d taken a notion to go for a ride on the one horse he owned. So off he goes, clinging on for his dear life, and yelling in the night. But he urges the horse off the road, you see, for some reason known only to himself, and in no time at all the horse is uneasy and trembling, what with a rider up there not exercising the authority the horse expects and has a right to. So the next thing is, the horse stumbles and there goes drunken James tumbling off his back with his head aiming right for a rock and, before even the rest of him had hit the ground, the man was dead and done. There’s a lesson in that but I’ll not be preaching at you here and now, I’ll leave it for yourselves to discover.”

  Father Henning took a slow drink from his glass. A few in his audience ventured a smile but none took their eyes from his face. The priest cleared his throat again and resumed.

  “So here’s the old woman—McKeon, we’ll say her name is—here’s old Mrs. McKeon left to her own devices, with little more than stirabout and praties to be feeding the lads, a few old chickens in the yard, and the weight of the whole thing falling heavy on her shoulders. She’s only a little bit of a thing, not a strong woman at all, and it’s a burden to her, not to mention the loss of her James. But she thinks and thinks and prays for the help of God and before long she devises a solution.

  “ ‘Johnny Mac,’ she says to the elder of the sons, ‘you must up and away now to make your way in the world, for I can no longer be putting food enough on the table to feed us all. It’s a hard thing I’m telling you, but it’s in the way of harsh necessity.’

  “The son, Johnny Mac, is not entirely surprised by the news, for he’s been seeing the mother looking funny at him for a while since the father’s passing, and pushing the extra egg on him of a morning, as if to build up his strength for a journey or a trial.

  “But he’s been thinking closely on the subject as well, and he puts down his knife and his potato, and he says firmly, ‘I’ll not be going off and leaving you only with the one lad here to be looking after you, and him even younger than meself. ’

  “ ‘Ye’ve much of your father in ye, may he rest in peace,’ says Mrs. McKeon, ‘but I’ll say the same to you as I had often to say to him. Ye’ll do as I say, Johnny Mac, and that’s an end of it, for I’ll not discuss it further. ’

  “Johnny Mac was silent after that, for he knew that tone in his mother’s voice. But the other side of it was, that his father had told him often while they walked of an evening at the edge of the bog, that should ill fortune befall him, the care of the old woman would all be upon his head. ‘Ye’re the eldest,’ his father had said, ‘and it all comes to you in the end.’

  “As you may imagine, there was much discussion back and forth in the course of the next few days, and some of it heated, I can tell you. But in the end, as they all knew he would from the start, Johnny Mac conceded and the mother won the day.

  “So, without going into some of the details, I can tell you the arguing was often unseemly and loud, and some of it not fit for repeating. The heart of it, the reason that Johnny Mac struggled so hard with his fate, was that he was torn, you see, pulled almost in two, by a pair of equal necessities. On the one hand, there was the image of his dead father, a good man whom he’d loved in despite of his faults and his untimely death, shaking a finger at his nose and telling him to stay on and look after the mother, and no matter what. And on the other hand, there was the mother herself, telling him to be off. But in the end, as I said, Johnny Mac yielded to his mother’s insistence and gave in.

  “And once he’d done that, he wasted no time at all in taking his leave, vowing the while that he’d find work somehow, somewhere, God willing, and send back the spare pound or the extra penny as often as he could, and that young Tim should now fill the place of the two of them in seeing to the mother’s well-being.

  “Well, the day comes for him to be off, and just as he goes out at the door, he turns back for a second and says, as he’s in the habit of doing, and his father before him, ‘God save all here,’ and the mother smiles and nods.

  “And don’t you know, Johnny Mac finds work in little more than a week’s time, just as the bit he’s taken from the purse as a stake is about to run out and leave him high and dry.

  “He’s come to a town, you see, where the railroad comes through. It’s not a fine and grand city, mind, but a respectable place that looks, to his eyes, accustomed as they are only to the village of his birth, like the farthest end of the earth. Not being used to the ways of the town, he walks up to a decent-looking man in the street and enquires where he might be asking after work. The man takes one look at the bulk of him and directs him to the railroad station. Well, this is Johnny Mac’s lucky day, for the station-master takes a good hard look at the width of his shoulders and the breadth of his chest, and tells him to take a seat until the supervisor comes along.

  “So Johnny Mac sits there waiting, with the stomach growling inside of him with the hunger and the thought of his mother in his mind, until along comes the supervisor. Well, this one does the same as the other, shaking his head over the bulk and brawn of the lad, and before the day is out, they’ve hired him on to stoke the furnace on the engines. You see, one of their boys is just after leaving them flat while he recovers from injuries suffered in an unfortunate altercation with another fellow bigger than himself. So there’s the railroad supervisor in need of a healthy lad who’s willing to work, and there’s old Mrs. McKeon’s Johnny Mac before him twisting his cap in his hand.”

  Father Henning paused a moment to wet his throat with the Guinness.

  “It was almost as if things were just naturally falling into place with a will of their own.”

  He took another drink for good measure, then set the glass on the table.

  “So. The particulars are all arranged and agreed right there and then, and Johnny Mac is set to work on the spot, that very evening, and he goes at it with a will, all the while thinking that, after all, the old woman was right. In no time at all, he expects, he’ll be getting his first pay envelope and sending home to his mother and his brother as much as he can, with only as much kept back as he needs himself to hold body and soul together. His father’s wish and warning is fulfilled in its essence, she still has the one son by her, and Johnny Mac figures to return to his place of birth and his mother’s hearth one of these fine days like the grandest of conquering heroes.

  “Now you may wonder at this point how the mother and the remaining son Tim are getting on back at home, but I can tell you that the tale, in this part of it, has no dealings with them. They’re getting by as well as may be, with no overabundance, to be sure, and only just fending off the ravages of hunger. No, the tale at this part is all about Johnny Mac and what became of him, but we’ll be going back to the village to take up the rest of it when the time comes, never fear.

  “So here’s Johnny Mac stoking and stoking and the furnace of the engine burning and burning and the train roaring along as proper as you please. Now it’s hard work the lad is doing, but he’s a good soul and the labor is all for the benefit of his old mother and he can already feel the weight of the coins in his pocket and so he minds it not a bit.”

  Father Henning lowered his voice.

  “But then, you see, the lad’s luck took a turn for the worse. A very serious turn for the worse, and no mistake about it.”

  The priest raised the glass again and sipped slowly while his listeners leaned forward and waited.

  “You see,” he resumed in the same sad, lowered voice, “Johnny Mac was only a country lad, with no experience or knowledge of the wider world, and here it all was just rushing past him on the train in a blur so as he could hardly make it out. He’d lift his head between the shovelfuls from time to time, with the salty sweat stinging at his eyes, and cast a glance to the side of the train, and there would be towns and villages and monumental great big cities the like of which were beyond all his dreaming.

  “And so after only a while, not a long time at all, the driver of the train took pity on him and said he could rest his arms and his back for a minute and look about him if he wanted. Well, Johnny Mac jumped at the chance. He wiped the sweat from his face with the tail of his shirt and stared in wonder at sights he’d never laid eyes on before. There in the distance was a great church with a steeple higher than Johnny Mac had ever imagined, and over there was a house with more windows to it, he thought, than there were in the whole of his village. Everything his eye fell on was different from what he’d known, even the sheep on the hillside were a different breed and every lass in a field far prettier than those he’d seen at home. Every sight was a thing of wonder and he marveled at the wisdom of his mother and the good fortune that brought him to this state, money promised for his pocket and the wonders of the world laid out before his feet and not a penny charged for the looking. Here, he told himself with the deepest satisfaction, was the greatest day of his life, and he had no hopes of ever seeing a greater.

  “And the sorry part is, there was truth in what he thought, for as it turned out, that was the last day ever his wondering eyes looked on the earth.

  “He was still hot, you see, from the heat of the furnace and his own labors in keeping it fed, and when he felt a bit of a breeze on his face, he thought he could need nothing more than that to complete his happiness. The speed of the train, of course, made the wind seem to rush all about it. So the lad grabbed hold of a handle and swung himself out from the side of the train to get the fullest benefit of the breeze. The sad thing, as you will have realized, is that he had no knowledge of the dangers in such an exercise, and it was those very dangers that brought him to an end as untimely, and even more bloody, than that of his deceased father. The driver of the train said after, in his remorse at being unable to prevent it, that the lad had no knowledge of what to expect and, when it did happen, just as quickly as that, he could have had no time to realize that his time was up in that instant.