An Early Wake

by Sheila Connolly

  She picked her way along the muddy, unpaved lane toward Bridget’s house, pulling her sweater close. It was September now, with the tourist season just ending. The days were getting shorter, and the wind sharper. She knocked on the front door of Bridget’s cottage, which was smaller even than hers. She knew Mick, Bridget’s grandson, made sure it was kept up and paid for his gran’s phone so she could reach him in an emergency. Bridget was well into her eighties, but refused to consider moving in with Mick’s sister a few towns over. This townland—called Knockskagh, or “hawthorn hill”—was her home, and she wouldn’t be moved from it; she’d settled into the cottage when she married and had lived here all her adult life. Maura might have wondered if Bridget got lonely if she hadn’t seen the steady trickle of friends and relatives who stopped by to make sure the old woman was all right and to swap gossip and news. It was nice, knowing that people were looking out for you. Her gran had done a lot of looking out for the struggling Irish immigrants who’d arrived in Boston.

  “Ah! Dia duit a Mhaire!” Bridget opened the door with a broad smile.

  “Dia’s Muire duit, a Bride,” Maura replied, with the little Irish she knew. Bridget had taught her a few phrases, like how to exchange a basic greeting.

  “Come in, come in,” Bridget said. “There’s a bit of a chill in the air, isn’t there?”

  “Definitely. I can’t stay long, but I was going crazy trying to sort out the finances for the pub and I thought some fresh air might help. Although I always like to see you.”

  “There’s tea on the stove and fresh scones in the tin, if yer hungry.”

  “Thanks.” Maura, long familiar with Bridget’s kitchen by now, helped herself. “Can I pour you a cup?”

  “That’d be grand, if it’s no trouble.”

  “No problem.” Maura filled two cups and carried them back to where Bridget now sat in front of a small fire. “Are you feeling the cold already?”

  Bridget sighed. “Don’t you be getting old, Maura—if it’s not one thing, it’s another. I can feel winter coming in my bones.”

  “Anything I can do?” Maura asked. She hated to think that Bridget might be failing. Since she’d lost her grandmother—the only relative she’d ever known—less than a year before, somehow she’d come to count on Bridget to take Gran’s place. It was because of Bridget that Maura had come to Leap in the first place, after she’d stumbled upon Bridget’s long correspondence with her gran.

  Bridget waved a dismissive hand at her. “Ah, don’t be minding me. I’m just a fussy aul woman. And don’t you be telling Mick that I’m complaining, either, or he’ll be after me again to move in with my granddaughter over to Bandon. Which would not suit me at all, for she’s got two loud children and little enough room as it is.”

  Maura knew Mick kept a close eye on his gran and would notice any decline in her condition on his own, so she wasn’t about to go tattling to him. She took a sip of her tea—strong, as always. “I’ve been trying to figure out if Sullivan’s is making any money. How did Old Mick manage?”

  “He didn’t ask for much. Many of his friends spent their time there of an evening. Not that they drank much. They could nurse a pint for hours, or so Mick used to say. They were there for the craic, not for the drink. God help the poor tourist who stuck his nose in while that crowd was in good form.”

  That wasn’t hard for Maura to imagine, especially since she’d made few physical changes since she’d taken over in the spring, afraid to drive away what patrons she had. Besides, she’d never been big on prettying up a place. She tried to imagine track lighting and new curtains in the pub and had to swallow a laugh, though she had at least managed to introduce a few new paintings, which had brightened some of the darker corners. The paintings were the works of Gillian Callanan, an artist who lived over the hill in an old creamery by the lake, at least during the summer. Maura hadn’t seen much of Gillian lately and wondered if she’d gone back to Dublin for the winter, as she had told Maura she usually did. Maura would miss her if she went, since Gillian was close to her own age and had quickly become a friend—one of the few Maura had made since she’d arrived—but she knew that Gillian couldn’t make a living selling her paintings during the winter around here. Besides, the creamery building wasn’t heated, certainly not well enough to withstand the wind rushing across Ballinlough. Maura could tell already that this could be a lonely place in winter.

  She stood up. “I should probably be going. Can I pick up anything for you?”

  “No, love, I’m grand. Mick came by yesterday. And don’t worry yerself about the numbers—I’m sure things will come right.”

  “I hope so, Bridget. See you later.”

  She shut the door on her way out, then trudged back to her place. She wasn’t sure why she’d asked Bridget if she needed anything, when Maura was the one with a bare pantry. There never seemed to be any time to shop, much less prepare meals, and she spent most of her waking hours at the pub. It was easier to walk down to the Costcutter at the gas station and pick up something quick.

  She drove into the village, glad in a way that the few clueless tourists who had ventured along the lanes had gone home now. To be fair, she’d been in the same boat herself not that long ago. It was hard for some people to accept that there were no road signs, except on the biggest of the main roads, and that most people gave driving instructions along the lines of “Turn left at the abandoned church and go up the hill until you see the field with the bull, then turn right at the fallen tree.” It took a bit of getting used to, and by the time most people did, it was time for them to leave. Luckily most of the time there were no cars on the lanes, which were pretty much one lane wide anyway.

  Maura parked her car well away from Sullivan’s—parking was at a premium along the main road and she didn’t want to discourage any potential customers—and went toward the front door of the pub, keys in hand. She was surprised to find the door already unlocked and Rose behind the bar. She stepped into the dark interior and took quick stock of the scene: no customers except for a casually dressed young man seated on a stool at the bar and talking to Rose with great animation.

  Rose looked up and saw her, then beckoned her over eagerly. “Maura, this is Timothy Reilly. He’s a student from Trinity up in Dublin and he’s here to work on a project, he says. Tim, this is Maura Donovan—she’s the owner here, since March. Mebbe you’d best explain what it is yer after.” Rose was as animated as Maura had seen her in a while, but then, Tim was a fairly attractive young man. He looked to be around twenty, putting him about five years younger than Maura, and he had an open, eager face.

  “Nice to meet you, Tim,” Maura said. “What brings you to the Wild West of Cork?”

  “It’s a pleasure, Maura. It’s the music that brings me—the music here at Sullivan’s.”

  Chapter 2

  For a moment Maura stared blankly at Tim: this was the first she’d heard anything about music at Sullivan’s. She glanced at Rose, who shrugged, apparently as ignorant as Maura. She pulled out a stool and sat down next to the young man.

  “Can I get you anything, Maura?” Rose asked.

  “A coffee, please. Tim, are you set?” He had an empty cup in front of him, so he must have been here for a while, even though the pub wasn’t officially open yet.

  “Another coffee would be grand, if you don’t mind, Rose.” He smiled at her.

  Rose blushed. “Right away.”

  Maura turned to face Tim. “So, what’s this about music?”

  He cocked his head at her. “American, are you? How do you come to own this place?”

  Maura noticed he hadn’t exactly answered her question, but by now she was used to the roundabout path most conversations here took. “I grew up in Boston, but my grandmother was the niece of the late owner, Michael Sullivan—that’d be Old Mick. I took over about six months ago.”

  Tim looked disappointed. “So you’d know little about the history of the place? Did you know this Old Mick?”
>
  Maura shook her head. “I never met the man, I’m afraid. And I kind of hit the ground running here, so there hasn’t been a lot of time to ask about what happened before I showed up. What are you looking for?”

  Rose set two mugs of coffee on the bar in front of them. Tim smiled his thanks, and Rose’s blush returned. “As Rose here said, I’m a student at Trinity in Dublin—do you know it?”

  “I haven’t seen Dublin yet, only this part of the country.” To be fair, Maura had seen the airport and the bus station, but she didn’t really think those counted. After arriving on a red-eye flight, she hadn’t noticed much about the scenery she’d passed on her way to Cork.

  Tim filed that fact away. “I’m doing an arts degree in musicology.” When Maura stared blankly at his description, he explained, “It’s the history of music, and to finish I have to write a dissertation—that’s a long paper—so I’m here fer the research. The department requires we know a bit about playing music, and I’m not a bad aul player m’self, but what I’m looking to do is teach music history and theory. Do you know anything about Irish bands?” He looked hopefully at Maura.

  She hated to disappoint him again, but she’d never been particularly interested in music. “You mean all that tin whistle and fiddle stuff?”

  Tim smiled. “That’s the traditional side of things. Which is all good and well—and some of the tunes go back for centuries, so it’s interesting to see them surviving today and still being played. But what interests me now is more the contemporary scene, and how modern musicians have borrowed elements of the old forms and made them into something new.”

  Maura glanced quickly at Rose, who had to know more than she did. “Like the Saw Doctors and the Cranberries,” Rose volunteered. “Is that what you mean, Tim?”

  The names meant nothing to Maura. Were those current bands? Or ancient history?

  He nodded vigorously. “Yes, but they’re not the only ones. Where do you come from, Maura? Did you mention Boston?”

  “Yeah, I grew up in South Boston.”

  “Grand—then surely you know of the Dropkick Murphys?”

  Maura smiled. It was impossible to grow up in Southie and not know the Dropkick Murphys; impossible to work in any local bar and not hear their songs in the background, over and over. “Them I know.”

  Tim beamed. “Well, there you go. They’re American, of course, but there’s still that element of the traditional in what they write, what they perform, even today. Maybe it’s in the genes, but that’s a study for a different department, for sure. What I’m looking at is the evolution of recent Irish music over the past couple of decades and its debt to the traditional.”

  “That sounds interesting,” Maura said politely. “But where does Sullivan’s fit?”

  Tim looked incredulous. “Do you not know? Sullivan’s was the heart of the music scene for this end of the country, back for a decade or more in the nineties.”

  Back in the nineties, Tim would have been in diapers. Why would he be interested in the music? But then, Maura didn’t claim to understand how colleges worked. She had a vague idea that when you wrote a paper you had to do something that hadn’t been done before. In that case, writing about the history of Sullivan’s definitely qualified. Maura searched her memory and couldn’t recall anyone mentioning music and Sullivan’s in the same breath, although now that she thought of it, there were some posters of bands tacked up in the little-used back room . . . “Here? But this is the middle of nowhere!”

  Tim nodded. “It is that, but who’s to question how these things come about? In its day, Sullivan’s drew players from all over. It was Mick Sullivan brought them together, and he sat in often enough. Or so I’m told.”

  Old Mick had been a musician? One more thing Maura hadn’t known about him. He must have had a wealth of stories to tell. And Tim here had missed him by only six months. Too bad. “It’s a shame you can’t talk to him,” Maura said.

  “It is,” he agreed. “I should have sorted things out sooner, but I’ve only just scratched the surface. But surely there are others around here who remember? Who knew the place back then?”

  Maura and Rose exchanged looks. “Before I was born,” Rose said. “Me da might know.”

  “Or Mick—young Mick, that is,” Maura explained to Tim. “No relation to Old Mick. But young Mick’s old enough to remember—he had to have been a teenager then, right, Rose?” Rose nodded.

  “And where might I find these fellas?” Tim asked.

  “Here,” Maura said promptly. “They’ll both be in sometime today—they work here. And they worked for Old Mick, before. I’m sure they’ll be happy to help. And, of course, there’s Billy Sheahan.”

  “Who’s he?” Tim asked.

  “An old friend of Old Mick’s—and I mean ‘old’ in both senses.” Maura smiled. “He’s in his eighties, and he and Old Mick were friends for decades. He usually comes in about now, and he’s here for most of the day.” Billy hadn’t yet arrived, but it was early yet. Maura wasn’t worried, since he lived on the ground floor at the other end of the building and could make his way to the pub blindfolded; once he arrived he’d stay most of the day, spinning tales for any tourists who wandered in and swapping stories with his local friends. Maura happened to know that most of Billy’s stories were true, although he wasn’t beyond throwing in a bit of creative detail, depending on his audience. She had come to realize that often in Ireland the telling of the story was more important than the truth of it. She had no idea what tourists made of him, but she was pretty sure they went away believing they’d had a taste of Auld Ireland.

  “Brilliant! That’s exactly what I was hoping for—an oral history of the way things were. I’d planned to poke around for a few days anyway.”

  “Do you have a place to stay?” Maura asked. So far her impression was that most people from outside County Cork assumed there were plenty of bed-and-breakfasts and hotels to be had, but the reality was a bit different: the Leap Inn, locally more often called Sheahan’s, across the street catered to fishermen and had only a handful of rooms; the hotel in Skibbereen was kind of upscale for a student; and the conference centers that were popping up here and there were probably far beyond his means.

  “I thought I’d look for a hostel or the like,” he said. “Do you know of one?”

  “I hear there’s one in Skibbereen, if you don’t mind dormitory style,” Rose volunteered.

  “That’d be grand. By the way, what music do you listen to here now? I don’t see any jukebox in the place.”

  “Nothing,” Maura admitted. “I don’t have time. There’s the television for the customers, for sports. When the place is busy, it’s too loud to hear anyway.” She spotted a couple of men coming in the door and excused herself to go over to greet them and take their orders as they settled themselves at a table. When she looked back, Rose and Tim were deep in conversation, no doubt comparing bands, local or other. For a moment Maura felt old, even though she was probably only a few years older than Tim. But, she told herself, she’d had much more life experience than a sheltered college student like Tim could have had. It was small comfort.

  There were a half dozen people in the place by the time Old Billy Sheahan made his slow way into the pub, headed for his accustomed chair like a stately tugboat.

  “Good morning to you, Maura, or, no, I should say, good afternoon,” Billy greeted her. “As the cold sets in, I move a bit slower.”

  “That’s what Bridget said too. What can I get you?”

  “A pint, if you will.”

  “Coming up.” She went over to the bar and went behind it to start pulling Billy’s pint.

  Rose turned to her and said tentatively, “Maura, would you mind if Tim and I went out for a bit of lunch? It’s quiet here.”

  “Sure, go ahead. I think I can handle it.” She smiled to indicate her sarcasm. And she wanted some time to talk to Billy alone about this whole music thing, of which she knew absolutely nothing. She had trouble pict
uring any friend of Billy’s as a music guru, although Old Mick and Billy would have been in their late sixties back then. Now that she thought about it, she could name a lot of performers who were still going strong in their sixties and even seventies, touring and everything. Like the Rolling Stones. Maybe she’d been too quick to judge.

  Rose and Tim went out the door, and Maura topped off Billy’s pint and took it over to him. She checked to make sure everyone else was well supplied with drink, then sat down next to Billy.

  “Who’s that young man who left with our Rose?” he asked. “Not from around here, is he?”

  “No, he’s a student, from Dublin, he says. His name’s Tim Reilly. He said he wants to find out about the music scene here in Sullivan’s in the nineties. It’s the first I’ve heard about it.”

  Billy’s eyes lit up. “I hadn’t thought of that in years! This used to be quite the place to play.”

  “So he was right about that?” Maura asked.

  “Oh, yes, musicians would come from all over. Not for concerts, as such, but to—what should I call it? Jam?—with each other. Like a seisiún is for the traditional kind of music.”

  “What they were playing wasn’t traditional?”

  “No, these were players of popular stuff. Not always the lead singer of this band or the other, but a lot of the sidemen. Word would go out—don’t ask me how, it was before all this electronic nonsense—and the players would come together here of an evening, late, and settle in the back room and go on half the night. And people would come to hear them. I don’t know how they’d find out it was happenin’, but they’d start appearing early in the evening, and they’d stay ’til the end. Packed, the place was.”

  “Was Old Mick a musician?”

  “He’d been known to pick up a fiddle now and then, but mostly he kept the drinks flowing.”

  “How’d they get around the regulations about closing times, if they stuck around all night? Even I know you can’t keep serving ’til dawn.” Maura knew there was some give-and-take, depending on the attitude of the gardaí, the local police, but she didn’t think the rules could be stretched that far.