The Chemist’s Wife was a friend of a friend who I’d met in the Carolinas. I call her that, not because she was a chemist’s wife then, but because she soon would be and is now.
We’d been in touch occasionally ever since we met. When, after securing the lease on the cottage, I put out the call for potential visitors, she answered. I was a little bit surprised that she wanted to come all that way just for the very short period over the American Presidents’ Day weekend. Still, the more was always the merrier, and with only Mrs. Trinket and me, the house had seemed empty relative to the holidays. She arrived on a Thursday and left the next Monday. The day after that I was to put Mrs. Trinket on a train to Dublin. Then I’d spend the last few days tidying up Sadie’s affairs before heading back to Seattle ourselves.
It had been implied that I might not need to make up an extra bed for The Chemist’s Wife in the months leading up to my departure. I was informed on the return trip from fetching her at the airport, however, that she had met The Chemist at a party a few weeks prior to Christmas and that he was The One. Honestly, I was happy for the girl, and happy for the chemist too, but I’m not going to lie and say that my winter of celibacy couldn’t have done with a bit of a thaw.
Your One enjoyed the subtle nuances of the country life I’d carved out for myself in The Town, but she mentioned on more than one occasion that she was hoping for the “Homer Simpson Irish Experience.” Not having seen the particular episode of the long-running animated series, I didn’t know the specifics, but I felt pretty comfortable with the assumption that subtlety and nuance weren’t part of the script. On the Saturday night of her stay I would treat her to the most caricatured Irish night out I could concoct on short notice featuring a real, not animated, cast of characters.
After a damp afternoon with Sadie playing on the strand, we sat atop a pasture wall on the cliffs at the entrance to The Town’s harbor. The sheep in the field behind us were near enough that we could not only smell their scent of damp flannel but could also hear them tearing tufts of grasses from the turf as they munched their way along the piled stones that separated the field from the cliff’s face. Sadie sat with us and biblically watched over the flock while The Chemist’s Wife and I waved at the parade of returning fishing boats.
Small flocks of gray and white gulls fluttered from just above the mast to behind the transom of each boat as they flew past the harbor mouth. The birds occasionally dove en masse after a scrap of whatever the deck hand might wash or kick from the deck of the boats. We talked mostly about The Chemist as the fishermen prepared their boats to unload at the town’s pier so that they might possibly enjoy a night in their own beds before returning to plow again the fertile fields of the North Atlantic.
If a first date is a job interview for a relationship, my conversation with The Chemist’s Wife felt like an ‘informational interview’: I wasn’t looking to get a “job” because she wasn’t hiring. We’d known each other for a fair bit of time, but I’d never really thought of her as a potential romantic partner until she quipped about not needing an “extra bed” when we emailed about her stay.
Though there wasn’t any real romantic chemistry between us, it felt nice to banter and to flirt a little. I’d had one attempt at a relationship after Beth and I split. That fling was destined for failure because I’d never really gotten over Beth. It sputtered in the months back in Seattle as I prepared for my winter in Kerry. When I’d left, it was on life support. I had no idea that the plug had already been pulled by this point.
As The Chemist’s Wife sat on our grass-tufted reviewing wall and saluted the returning dredgers and anglers, and we chatted and flirted and simply watched in silence, I wished that it was Beth there with me and Sadie. She had put up with so much as I sank deeper and deeper into self-doubt and felt MS eat away at my former life. Beth had been there for the hardest times after diagnosis—the darkest times. She deserved to be there as things got better. But unlike the boats returning with our dinner, that ship had sailed and it wasn’t returning to my port.
I had already planned for us to dine on the fruits of the mariners’ labor—battered, fried, and served with a mound of chips laced with crunchy salt and tart vinegar—for our evening meal. That the boats gave the impression of our main course being so fresh as to virtually flop along from sea to boat to fryer was a herald of our fabled night ahead.
Back at the cottage, Your One showered and changed for our epic night in town. Meanwhile I stoked the grate with most of the contents of a bag of dug turf we purchased from the same filling station where I’d first seen the farmer unloading their cousins nearly a year before. I, of course, told her the story of the farmer and the fields where he dug the dirt by hand. I even gave her his name and the names of his children: Sean Patrick, the farmer, and his children, Sean, Patrick, Mary, Malachy, and Fiona. If we were going to make this a Homer Simpson experience, why not lay it on thick?
“You can almost smell the heather as his turf burns,” I said when I loaded the sack into the boot of my fifth and final hired car. “It’s the best in the county.”
“Say, Trevis,” she called from the living room while I changed my muddy clothes. “I see what you were saying about this peat. It really does smell of heather.”
Seriously! Either she was playing the cards I laid down in expert fashion for the fun of the game or Your One had no idea a game was being played at all. The Chemist was either a very lucky man or one who would have to keep a very close eye on his soon-to-be wife. But if I think about it, hadn’t I suspended my sense of disbelief for nearly three months? Wasn’t I taking everything the town had to offer at face value? Could it be that I had been living The Quiet Man version of The Town just as The Chemist’s Wife wanted her Simpsons version? Who was I to judge?
Letting go the rails, I dove right into the experience with Your One. As I held open the door to the public house I’d chosen for our fish ’n chips dinner, I opened the door to whatever possibilities the night might have in store.
I waved to the owner who I’d come to casually know during the many batter-dipped lunches my guests and I shared.
“Hiya, Trevis?” he said from behind the bar. “Another visitor from America, is it? And a lovely at that,” he continued with a wink that was directed either at me or my friend, I wasn’t certain.
Your One both beamed and blushed a little bit, and we were waved to a table against the wall. Rule number one of taking someone around “your” town: only take them to places where people know you. If they seem to like you, that’s a bonus too.
Now, you may be thinking, a chef eating fish ’n chips? Well, let me tell you, good ingredients thoughtfully prepared following the basic laws of cooking methodology—yes, frying is a classic cooking method—is just plain good food. The slabs of fresh fish that arrived at our table, European Plaice for me and Atlantic Cod for Your One, had been dusted in seasoned flour before being run through batter made with ale from the bar. We were lucky enough to be there on the day the fryer oil was changed. You can tell when oil needs to be changed by the overly dark color of the food and a “greasy” look and possibly even flecks of darker colored stuff that has burned and broken down in the oil. The shatteringly crisp crust was thick enough to give our fillets a yeasty hint of flavor from the beer but not so thick as to hide the flaky white flesh within the golden envelope.
Even though our chips, or French fries, were standard Irish restaurant quality sticks of potato, they were Irish potatoes, which really cannot be beat when it comes to fry-worthy tubers. The side salad that came with the fish wasn’t really worth mentioning. Side salads in Ireland seldom, if ever, are worth a mention, let alone the calories, as they are usually dressed pretty thickly. Though neither of us could finish our manhole-cover sized portions of fish, let alone the alpine peak of chips upon which they were balanced, dessert was in order.
To keep with our über-Irish theme of the night, I ordered us a Sticky Toffee Pudding to finish our meal. The dense, date-studded cake is sweet and rich in and of itself. When topped with its namesake toffee sauce made of butter, brown sugar, cream and alcohol, the dish’s dark, sweet richness is surrounded with a pool as thin and as pale as my words to describe the dessert. I called for a dram of whiskey to help cut the decadence on our plates only to find that 1) The Chemist’s Wife had never had Irish whiskey and 2) she really, REALLY liked it.
I could think of no better place to go after our stereotypic meal of cartoon proportions than the tourist pub where the bartender had explained to me that they weren’t offended by Americans trying to get their Irish on. It was perfect for our purposes and even more over the top than I could have hoped for.
Rather than the simple duo of guitar and fiddle or guitar and banjo or guitar and consortia (a small squeeze box instrument) or the ever-popular guitar and guitar, tonight’s musical offering was actually quite a show. A local percussionist, I learned, had been giving a workshop on traditional Irish drumming. We must have walked in on some sort of graduation session because there wasn’t a thing that had been musically pounded upon for the previous several centuries of Irish music that wasn’t being used for drumming.
Several sizes of bodhrán, a goat-skin covered hoop drum, were on knees. Like a large tambourine without the metal cymbals, bodhráns date back to the early nineteenth century and are played with one hand holding a two headed cipin, or “tipper,” that can be used on the skin or the frame to create sounds. A few men played the bones, some being simply wooden versions of spoons that clapped together and some being honest-to-goodness animal bones, by bouncing them in between the heal of the hand and the thigh. Wedged in between the ankles and calves of another man was the old-timey instrument called “the box,” which was just that—a wooden box that is open on the back and played with different parts of the open hand.
Along with all of these drums, Your Man had assembled several local musicians playing all of the above mentioned string instruments as well as a mandolin, an accordion, and even a small Celtic harp. The corner bench where two players usually sat was augmented with several others into a geometrical mess with most of the musicians facing one another rather than the rest of the room. The place was once again mostly filled with locals rather than tourists, owing to the time of year I suppose. The numbers rivaled the night of Women’s Christmas, though the gender mix was closer to even this time.
The music in The Town was always very good. On this night the good became great and you could feel that something quite special was happening. Players would sit out songs they did not know and watch others playing their parts to learn. Toe tapping became outright stomping during some songs, and soon the dancing began.
Couples began to spin and sets formed. Here and there farmers and shopkeepers, bachelor laborers and married professionals, throngs of them, began to step-dance the hard-shoe dances they learned in school. The low-slung ceiling of the rooms kept the dancers from jumping too high, but otherwise we’re talking full-on Riverdance stuff here.
We both switched over to sparkling water by the bottles full as the heat and personal humidity of the pub climbed to Amazonian reaches. Others in the room, particularly one table of Germans camped on a bench between the fireplace and the band, quelled the increasing swelter by increasing the pace of their intake as well, only it wasn’t water in their pint glasses.
One of their party, a very tall, very thin man with sparse wisps of blond hair and limbs that seemed to dangle from the top and bottom of his torso, unfolded himself from the table. It was either his round to buy or time for a nature call to make room for his next. The scarecrow of a man had to duck as he crossed under the open archway leading from the musicians’ room to the next and then on along the corridor to the toilets. I say “scarecrow,” but the way his extremities moved about and his head bobbled above his shoulders when he passed, it was as if his joints had been lubricated by the tin woodsman’s oil can.
As the drinking up hour was fast approaching, I asked The Chemist’s Wife if she’d like another drink. We had consumed nothing but water for a couple of hours and perspired enough, so I saw no harm in joining her in a glass of her newly discovered spirit.
“No, not yet. I don’t think so,” was her answer, so I went to replace our empty bottles of water with two more of the same.
As I negotiated the substantial but manageable crowd from the bar to our perch in front of the archway where Lubricated Man had passed us a few minutes before, I found myself on an intercept track with his returning self. We made eye contact like two drivers approaching an unregulated intersection and motioned each other the right of way. Our stopping and starting as we followed each other’s offering was accented by the waggle of his arms and legs with each false step.
At some point we both—but I think he first—realized that we were stepping, and thus his arms swinging, in close proximity to the rhythm of the music. He looked at his feet and hands as if they were new to him or possibly even someone else’s as they moved to the omnipresent beat. It was with a certain amount of wonder, as if he had never seen nor felt his body moving to music before, that he looked at me and smiled the smile of intoxicated joy.
And then he was off.
Ducking his head under the arch and trying as best he could to mimic the stiff arms of traditional Irish step dancing, he entered into the musicians’ room like a marionette on a springboard. For a few moments, as he paid what attention he had to the task at hand, he wasn’t all that bad. He was on, or at least very near, the beat, and while his moves were as exaggerated as his body, they made some musical sense. Once he realized that he had the attention of the room, his attention shifted to all of us and our reactions rather than the all-important music.
He danced in a kind of syncopation to the music that reminded me of the two loudspeakers at opposite ends of the Main at Christmas. He was close but not close enough. The harder he tried to catch up or slow down to the beat, the very distance his thought had to travel from his head to his feet seemed to get in the way. But he did not stop. He stomped and stumbled, bounced and bobbed. I felt bad when for a short few steps he caught up to the rhythm, only to lose it more completely than before.
Though he had the steady clapping of the whole room urging him on in unison, it was something of a mercy when the set ended and the lights of the bar popped on to signal that the drinking-up hour had been reached. The room erupted in applause, for the dancer at first, but then in real appreciation of the band and their extraordinary efforts. Your Man continued to take bows until some of his tablemates retrieved him from his one-man dance floor.
“You wanted Homer Simpson’s Ireland,” I said to Your One as I reached for our coats. “I think you got your wish.”
“Where to next?” she asked after laughing the entire time it took to dress for the cold.
“That’s it,” I said. “It’s eleven. The pubs close at eleven here, even on the weekend.”
Even though she knew—and she knew that I knew—that the purring that came next was harmless and playful, a little part of me worried for The Chemist if we did go for one more. You just don’t take advantage of another man’s woman when he’s far away. Putting that concern aside, I quickly ushered her out the door and up the Main to the pub of the “broken clock” for one final round. If she continued to purr, I wouldn’t mind. I hadn’t had any purring in a long time.
Not a few of us traversed from the tourist pub to The Clock, but we were quick enough to the door that we found seats, while most of the others had to stand. I ordered Herself a dram and a pint for me. I noticed that a few of the patrons at the bar had more than one and in some cases more than two glasses two-thirds full of porter sitting in front of them. I asked Your Man behind the counter what all the partial construction was about.
“We stop selling drinks at eleven,” Your Man informed me. “No cop in the Free Irish Nation would stop me from finishing off a man’s pint for him if it wasn’t quite done at the appointed hour now, would he?”
The skirting of the law did not end with the perpetual running behind of the official timepiece, it would appear. As the hour approached, I felt the need to get in on the fun and ordered myself a couple of beers and an extra for Your One as well. I had no intention of finishing them both off because I was driving. With that thought, I remembered the sober taxi man’s card in my wallet, so the idea wasn’t a total non-starter. In the end, I only had the one and The Chemist’s Wife opted for another whiskey at last call.
As we sat on our stools, which we had draped with our coats, we laughed at the spectacle that played itself out for us that evening.
“In all my time here, and even in trips before this one,” I honestly admitted, “I have never even heard of a night like this, let alone being a part of one.”
Sure, there was the night in Dublin with my parents a couple of years prior. My father sheepishly knocked on my door the next morning, fully expecting both of the English women from the pub where we were all having a good time the night before to be in my room
“They’re not here, Da,” I said in answer to him peeking around my shoulders through the open door. “Not anymore ….”
To this day my father tells the story as if the ladies had scurried from my room just moments before his arrival. Some things we just let our fathers think.
But the truth of the matter is that the night I took The Chemist’s Wife out for a made-up, over-the-top night in The Town turned out to be the most real of over-the-top extravaganzas. And then we were treated to what Americans think of as a quintessential Irish curtain call.
Among a group of young and rather attractive tourist women stood a man who could have stepped straight out of central casting. Tufts of carrot-ginger hair sprouted from beneath his cap that closely—but not closely enough—matched the tweed of his jacket. His face and eyes were equally round, though his chin showed a shadow of his former, chiseled self. His cheeks matched his nose with a light shade of cardinal.
He cleared his throat once for purpose and then one more time, louder, for effect and hummed a beautiful low C. Then he cleared his throat again.
The tenor then snuck up on the note with a long, soft but rising, “OoooooooooOOOh,” which he followed in the most beautiful timbre, “Danny Booooooooooy” and so on with the song.
You don’t hear “Danny Boy” sung much in Ireland. It’s not like you hear people in Virginia popping off “Shenandoah” in bars, or “My Old Kentucky Home” at a Lexington barbecue joint. But there it was, being sung to the now hushed crowd, who had all stopped what they were doing to listen.
Not everyone in the bar approved of Your Man’s choice of song. A local woman near us said rather loudly in the gap that happens as soon as a song is finished but before the applauds deafen the room, “AH, fer FECK’S SAKE, it’s not like it’s feckin’ really an Irish feckin’ song!” followed by an exasperated and prolonged, “Fheeeeeeeeck!”
This drew a few quick laughs, but was lost to clapping and shouts of “Well done!” for our troubadour.
Though it was evident by the glasses some of our fellow patrons had on deck and in the hole that the evening could go on for quite a while longer, we decided to call it a night and call ourselves that taxi. Before leaving, though, I slid the two partially built pint glasses to the lad next to me and wished him a good night and the same to the tender of the taps. We tried to make our way over to the tenor, but his gathering of young women had grown and there was no need to interfere with the well-won adoration.
We stepped out of the pub and into the night and slipped out of what felt like a drunken dream and into the sober cab.