Terry Mullen kicked up the doorstop and guided the door shut. Daniel refilled his coffee and walked toward his preferred seat on the far left side of the room. Rows of chairs were arranged classroom-style in two sections, separated by a center aisle, and nearly every chair was filled.
In a lull of conversation as the gathering found their seats, he heard a familiar voice call, “Wait, please!” Terry pulled back the door, and Annie Crowe entered, her face flushed, her smile strained. She mouthed her thanks and nodded as Terry pointed to empty seats in the back row.
“Good to see you, lad.” Bea Moriarty slipped her arm through his. “How’s the art coming along?”
He allowed himself to be escorted by the hummingbird of a woman who, proudly sober for forty years, had devoted her career to counseling addicts across Cork, dispensing her warmth when needed and tough love when that was called for, too.
“It’s coming along. Good days and bad days, like most everything else.”
“What was today, Danny? A good one or a bad one?”
He ushered Bea into the chair next to his and took one last look at the back of the room before sitting down. Annie wriggled out of her raincoat, steam wafting from her as the chilled air she’d carried in met the heat of the room, stuffed with bodies in waterproofs and wool.
Annie, an alcoholic. Fifteen years around addicts of all flavors and he’d developed a good sense about these things, but this one he’d missed.
“Today?” he whispered against Bea’s rouged and wrinkled cheek. “Today was interesting.”
The room fell silent, and with one voice, punctuated by nicotine-laced coughs, the group recited the Serenity Prayer. Daniel heard voices speaking in English, Gaelic, German; the two brothers seated one row ahead and few seats down recited the prayer in their native Polish. They were construction workers who’d brought their families to Ireland three years ago, settling in a Polish enclave outside Bantry. There was Mawusi across the aisle, wearing a long wool sweater draped over a brightly patterned skirt of kente cloth. Originally from Ghana, Mawusi had earned a master’s in social work in Dublin and now worked as a drug and alcohol counselor out of Skibbereen.
Daniel considered these changing sounds and faces of Ireland—the ancient and the new—brought together by addiction, joined in fellowship and need. A hush descended again as voices trailed off, ending the prayer.
Mór mo náir.
The voice rang low, vibrating in the air like a gong. He lifted his head. Denis from Bantry rose, the Twelve Steps pamphlet shaking slightly in his hands, and began to read in a halting voice.
Mór mo náir.
Great my shame, she said, a mother’s croon to her child, Leda’s murmur to her swan. It was the same voice he’d heard in the car park that morning in Castletownbere. And, like those words—mór mo bhrón, great my sorrow—he understood the Gaelic but could not place the meaning.
Many recovery stories were shared that evening, but Annie’s was not among them. In the meeting’s final minutes, someone in the back stood to introduce herself as Margaret and declared she’d been sober for eleven months and fourteen days. As the gathering greeted her, Daniel shifted in his seat to see past the speaker’s body to the row behind, where Annie sat. Where Annie had been sitting. The chair one row behind and to Margaret’s right was empty.
~
“Bea, you’re a Gaelic speaker, aren’t you?” The hour had come to an end, and the room rumbled once more with conversation, chairs scraping across the linoleum, cell phones beeping, feet pounding overhead as the group filtered up the stairs and through the hallway above.
“Of course, Danny. I’m from Letterkenny; we spoke only Gaelic at home. But in secret, you know. Wasn’t allowed in school. You’re needing a translation?” In a pink hand-knit cardigan stretched over the round ball of her torso, with hair like white floss, Bea resembled a wrinkled but still-fresh rosebud.
“Not exactly. I understand the words, but I don’t know where they’re from.”
“Let’s have them.”
“Mór mo náir, which I’d translate as ‘great my shame.’ Mór mo bhrón means ‘great my sorrow,’ I think. I feel as though I’ve heard them before—maybe a song? I just can’t place when or where.”
Bea’s round, pink face crinkled like crêpe paper with her smile. “Daniel Savage. For shame. Don’t you know your Irish history?”
He held up his palms in surrender. “I skipped that day?” he offered. “Matter of fact, I skipped most of high school. Though I thought I’d made up for it prison.”
Bea placed one hand on his shoulder, one on her heart, and closed her eyes. The Gaelic poured from her throat in syllables that had all their rough edges rounded off as they passed over her tongue.
Mise Éire: Sine mé ná an Chailleach Bhéarra.
Mór mo ghlóir: Mé a rug Cú Chulainn cróga.
Mór mo náir: Mo chlann féin a dhíol a máthair.
Mór mo phian: Bithnaimhde do mo shíorchiapadh.
Mór mo bhrón: D'éag an dream inar chuireas dóchas.
Mise Éire: Uaigní mé ná an Chailleach Bhéarra.
The room hushed as Bea recited, though several voices joined her in the familiar phrases. She finished and opened her eyes to applause and “We love ya, Bea.” At a half-shouted “Erin Go Bragh,” laughter rippled around the room.
She winked a shining eye at Daniel. “Ring any bells?”
“You had me at Mise Éire.” Of course he knew the poem. It had been written by Patrick Henry Pearse, a leader of the 1916 Easter Rising, the greatest battle of the Republican Irish against British Home Rule. Mise Éire translated to I am Ireland.
“Good boy. Now, are you going to make me ask why you’re wondering about Mise Éire?”
“I won’t make you ask, but I don’t have much of an answer. I’ve heard those phrases in recent days, but I couldn’t put them in context. Now at least I know where they come from, though I still don’t know how they found their way into my head.”
“Well, if you’re hearing things now, at least you’re hearing the right things, so. God bless you, lad.”
He stood and bent to kiss her powdered cheek. “Thanks for the chat, Bea.”
“That kiss’ll keep me alive at least another week.” She patted his cheek in return. “You’re a good man. Now go off and do good things.”