The Beauty of Irish Life

Cormac MacConnell - The West's Awake

The Beauty of Irish Life

May 15, 2008

By Cormac MacConnell

COUPLES love to get married in the little Carrygerry Chapel a few hundred yards down the road from the cottage. It is easy to see why, especially in Maytime of the blossoms. We were married there ourselves nearly a decade ago now.

This is a small rural half-parish in which the local marriage rate would be low, but couples from outside book the little chapel because if its pastoral setting, the old stone walls and castles on its horizons, the glitter of the Shannon away down below.

The weddings are at the weekends, usually the Saturdays. We locals always know if there is going to be one the next Saturday because the families involved have to erect their own road signage in advance.

The chapel is on one side road of the mazy topography and they need that. Usually they attach a few balloons to the cardboard signs and, if the weather is windy, what happens is that the signs have been blown down by the Saturday morning, leaving nothing behind but a wizened deflating pink (always pink) balloon. So people get lost hopelessly.

We are always meeting them and directing them to the proper destination. Usually they are heading entirely in the wrong direction.

A few Saturdays ago I was sitting in the cottage in the early afternoon reading the paper. The front door was open. There were only about two sods reddening on the hearth. It was bright and warm outside.

A burly shadow came between me and the light, and when I looked up there was Anthony from Westmeath in his Sunday suit of a Saturday. I did not then know he was Anthony from Westmeath; that came later.

He had a big blue collar body comfortably filling the suit, white shirt and tie, pleasant reddish face, big, strong, manual hands, a fine pair of shiny black shoes, maybe about 65 years old, still vigorously healthy and strong.

“Hello,” I said. “I suppose you are lost like all the rest of them. You’d be heading down to the chapel for the wedding I’d say. Don’t worry, you are only about a minute away.”

Sometimes I like to be kinda smart, and he looked like the kind of man who would appreciate a bit of craic.

“I’m not lost,” said Anthony from Westmeath. ”I was at the chapel already. I just came up to see if Maisie’s was still here.

“I was at a wake here about 30 years ago and had a good night. That’s why I’m here. I was surprised to discover the thatched roof still looking out over the wall. The most of them are gone now. Fair play to you. You’re not Maisie I’d say.”

The old lady from whose executors we bought the cottage was Maisie Sheahen, a local legend. She was a spinster from Limerick, a keen card player, a great gardener, still remembered locally with great respect.

The stone nameplate on the wall says the cottage is Maisie’s. It will never be called Cormac’s or Annett’s by any of our neighbors.

“No. I’m Cormac. Come in and take the weight off your feet. You have plenty of time. Don’t the brides keep the grooms waiting for up to a half an hour nowadays before they arrive?”

And he came in like a shot. And we introduced ourselves.

And when I offered a cup of coffee he suggested a mug of tea. And we had a dram in honor of the occasion.

He’d been working in Shannon as a young fellow on a contract when he was brought out by a work companion who was a local man to the wake in Maisie’s, and it was the best wake he was ever at, he said. They finished up at all hours of the morning drinking whiskey and playing cards.

There was a priest playing cards too, and Maisie’s big dog bringing in turf for her from outside all the night and the corpse (he indicated) laid out in what is now our bedroom.

I’d strangely enough heard the story. The dead man had been a friend of Maisie’s for years, lived alone nearby, and when he got ill she brought him to the cottage to care for him in his last days.

When he died he was waked here at a time when the inveterate card player had games every week with her friends and neighbors. That group included at least one priest.

“I’ve heard a lot of stories over the last few years about Maisie,” is what I said, “but I never heard even one bad word about her.” And that’s the truth too.

Ye know something? From there we began chatting about everything and nothing in particular, including my trade and his (a building contractor).

The reason I’m telling about this interlude at all is because I find such simplicities of rural Irish living to be absolutely heartwarming.

It is still here. Two strangers can go from 0 to 90 in less than a minute around a fireside still today, a gentle chat, a sharing of minute fractions of their lives, two mugs of tea, one small dram apiece, the essence of peace.

He lost his wife, the mother of his three grown children, only last year. That was another bond.

We chatted about things like that until I remembered that his niece would by now be well married below in Carrygerry, and he said easily he would catch up with them at the hotel reception.

And he left in his own time and season, saying he would know not to pass Maisie’s door again. He lives near Rahan, he said, and gave me his telephone number, so I’m not to pass his door either.

We will probably never meet again. But that does not matter at all. I think ye know what I mean.

Share this story: digg this | Add to del.icio.us

Print Save Discussions

Discuss

Email a friend