Caro’s Ramble to Cashel

by Ian McDuff

It was a duty and a pilgrimage.

The others had been understanding, but not all of them had truly understood. Oh, AJ had had trouble with the concept: his own griefs were still so sharp, and his own beliefs still so shaky in some ways, that – while he said nothing that was not indicative of the largest measure of loving support – it was evident, despite his best efforts, that he was concerned by this pilgrimage that Howie purposed.

The rest, in varying degrees, had tried to understand Howie, as Aidge honestly had tried, and some of them came closer than others, of course. Still, it was curious that so many in the world in these days confused pilgrimage with penance and conceived of duty as always distasteful. J had been badly confused, for one; but Howie could leave that to his other friends to deal with. So long as he had gotten through to Nicky, all was well. And Kev, especially, and Bri, understood full well the concept of tribute, and of a labor of love; and Chris, on a very deep level, comprehended what it was to enact a memorial sacrament. Lance Bass was a son of the South: he knew all about familial piety; and the private Bass, Josh’s James, was well along on his own transit from small-town Southern Baptist to high-cotton, Dixie-prep Whiskypalian. Like Joe, the private James understood what the Nicene Creed meant by ‘the communion of saints.’ As Fr de Guzaman always said, ‘death, for the faithful, is an incident, and the Church Triumphant and at rest is always at the shoulder of us here below, the Church Combatant, a mystic aid to us and a cloud of witnesses to our strivings. Death, we are assured by Truth Incarnate Himself, by Our Lord’s own words, is nothing more than long-distance, and those who have gone before are within call, always. And – unlike long-distance in this mortal world, there are no charges for the call and no need to dial extra numbers.’

The others not being Fr de Guzaman’s parishioners, their comprehension of what Howie was doing varied, but their love and support never varied, whether they were as bemused as Justin or as accepting as James’s Josh. The one thing he could count on was that they, at least, did not think he had gone crazy, and were all willing to accept, even if not all of them understood, that his journey to Ireland was not morbid. They were unfaltering in their belief in him and in his sanity.

Which made it all the more odd that he himself was beginning to wonder if he were going mad.

There was nothing crazy about the project, the task before him. Though all of Paula’s children had a borinqueño magic in their blood, a special duende, none of them forgot that, through Hoke, they were Doroughs, of the Ó Dorchaidhe of Kerry. And for Caro, that had meant that all her life she had a fondness for the music of that green and misty land, and especially for the music of the clarsach, the Irish harp. And by a coincidence of names, at first, and then through being rapt by the genius of him, she had been fondest of the works of the great, blind harpist of the early XVIIIth Century, the bard of Roscommon, Turlough Ó Carolan. Of all his compositions, the one that in all its variations – for Carolan had left only the melody, for each to interpret and arrange as he wished in after years – the planxty that had been her favorite was ‘Carolan’s Ramble to Cashel.’ Not the Rock of Cashel, that dour fortress (the word caiseal itself means ‘fortress’) in County Tipperary, nor any of the other Cashels that dot Ireland, long a land of forts as well as of saints and bards, and for good reason; but rather was it Cashel Mountain, a not unkindly eminence in the rich and kindly country of County Roscommon: and none so very far from there, in Kilronan churchyard, is Carolan himself buried, awaiting the Last Day.

Caro had meant always to go there, to the grave that was of Carolan and for a ramble to Cashel. And it was not some grim task, but a sweet and proper undertaking, that Howie now had come there in her stead, and with her, for, be she on the green mortal sward of earth or with the saints at rest, she was as close to him always as breathing, as ever-present in his heart as was Nick himself. And for a musician of parts, one to whom the fretting strings of the guitar were long familiar, a pleasant task had it been to learn the harp well enough to play the ‘Ramble.’ For Caro would he play it, at sunrise on the peak of Cashel, and for Carolan as well, a double tribute, and it would be not a mourning but a song of praise for lives lived and for peace and rest with the saints achieved. If this were a pilgrimage, it were as merry a one as ever sent praiseful monk from an Irish cloister across the narrow seas to Iona, or barefoot to Armagh, or Croagh Patrick, or Tara’s Slane, or Saul in Downpatrick, or Boyle Abbey; or as drew the singing folk and troubadours to Compostella and Chaucer’s immortal archetypes to Canterbury.

There was method enough in it, then, this journey of remembrance, method and no madness, not a whit.

And yet Howie was beginning to wonder if he were indeed losing his mind, and wasn’t that a thought to be thinking now and in Ireland, at all, at all?

It had begun subtly and unalarmingly enough, after all. A chance resemblance here and there; no doubt in the world of it, only it was that he was unused, still, not to be moving within their charmed circle, the ten of them together, not perhaps under the one rooftree of an afternoon, but none so far off for that, and easy enough to run into one or another of the other eight, Nick being ever by him, on the most mundane of errands, at bank or grocer’s or some business function. They were a planetary system, a solar system around the fixed star of their own dreams and work, and the orbits of them intersected often, in complex permutations. So it was not alarming at all, that he should subconsciously see the back of a head in a pub, or a far figure on the horizon, and think first that it resembled one of the other eight than Nick and himself, even though his conscious mind would be swift to remind him that he was in Mother Ireland’s bosom now, and they not within a thousand miles of her.

But when these tricks of the mind persisted, even after a week in the fat, douce midlands of Ireland where the tourists were few on the ground – they mostly preferring the West and its wild coasts, or Dublin, Baile Átha Cliath, and the blood-history-soaked lands of the Pale – then, then it was that Howie began to misdoubt himself.

The worse – perhaps the worst, though early yet it was, surely, to say that he had reached the worst – but sure the worser aspect it was, that his mind was beginning to structure these mistakes and illusions into a coherent narrative, giving a pretense of rationality to the tricks his mind was playing upon him, as dreams incorporate disparate stimuli. Full well he knew that the others were elsewhere, about their own concerns: he knew their schedules, those announced to the public and those that they kept in truth, and he knew too that this was his time, and Nick’s, and none else’s at all whatever. And yet, for all that, it was now that he thought he saw the ghost of them in places where their presence might almost have made sense.

‘I dunno, babe,’ Nick said worriedly, his brow furrowed like a plot of taties fresh-sown. ‘I’m sure there’s an expiation.’

Uneasily, Howie silently rejected the possibility that the explanation lay with the Sidhe. In Ireland it was all too easy to half-believe in the People of the Hills.

Had it not been for the sightings of those not there, there would have been not spot nor mar upon their time there, there in the green heart of Ireland. Nor in the midlands nor anywhere in Ireland it was far from the restless sea, and they upon its strand within a few hours at the longest, Nick’s eyes reflecting its changeful light and the sea-spume of it, the salt and the spray and the scudding clouds, that being the way of him whenever by the oceans that spoke to his soul.

And they did eat at Doyle’s Sea Food Bar in Dingle, in the Doroughs’s ancestral Kerry, on a day trip, with the freshness of it and the rightness, and all the fish and shellfish fresh-landed from the Dingle boats, and the gulls crying over the harbor at the richness of it.

And too they sailed out to the Aran Islands, as a pause in their coming through Galway’s Connemara country back towards Roscommon, and when they had returned from Galway Bay and the Isles of Aran, taking land again at Oranmore, they dawdled through the great plain that is east of Lough Corrib, and that contrasts so fiercely with the wild Connemara region for all that both are parts of County Galway: the rich limestone plain that falls away to the Roscommon border and the rolling River Shannon, silted with history. And they stopped at Athenry, and the fields of Athenry, that songs were written of.

And they came back to County Roscommon through Ballygar, with its angling on the River Suck, and Aghrane Woods brushed and bronzen with the first light strokes of autumn on the land.

And, faith, but the days were fine with clean, pure air, and the grand nights crisp and lengthening, fit for slow love, and all the land ripe around them. And whiles, Howie would talk with Nick without a word between them needed, and whiles, he would talk to Caro, who was always with him in mind and heart and never more so than in Ireland; and he would say to her, ‘Wasn’t that the fine day, and the walk in the forest, and the mist off the lough, and a grand sky and all the birds in it singing?’ And he felt her own delight in it as well and knew she was with him there even as Nick was, in her own way.

It was a grand time they had of it, but the continuing glimpses of friends not within five thousand miles of them.

The apparitions continued, and a worrisome thing it was for Howie. And they were all too believable, but that he knew the others, save Nick, were away and away elsewhere, with family or in studios or on projects of their own.

That fugitive glimpse, that vanished even as he turned to look, of a tall, dark-polled man with a questing nose and a tattered backpack patched with environmental movement patches, drinking the pure water of a stream, or, again, half-visible through the woods of the Lough Key Forest Park, or silhouetted against a shaft of sun on the walking path of the Suck Valley Way, what for would he even form a vagrant thought that it could be Kevin, and he in Kentucky with his wife?

A lean, wild-maned figure against the light, its details uncertain but its posture as familiar almost as Nick’s own, at Boyle Abbey where the old Cistercians had built for the ages, or at the Abbey of St John in Lecarrow; or walking upon the ruined battlements of castles long overthrown by time, at Ballintober or Donamon; or just seen peripherally, standing before Carolan’s own harp at Clonalis House; or glimpsed just leaving the art gallery attached to the Old Schoolhouse Museum at Ballintober, or the gallery of the landscape artist Annabel Langrish in Boyle, moving away with that characteristic lathy amble. It was not Chasez, the architectural and artistic and musical Chasez, at all.

That contradictory figure, at once gangling and compact, cobby and lithe, like one of the big cats – that figure half-seen in the mists off the lough, or on the Lung waters, brandishing the tools of the contemplative man’s recreation (the Psalmist was an angler and an honest man: thy rod and thy gaff, they comfort me), coarse angling; that same figure seen again through a veil of sand exploding upward from a bunker, at the Roscommon Golf Club at Mote Park – never a chance it was, despite the eye’s deceit and the sleights of the subconscious mind and the stance of the figure and the look of it, devil a chance it was AJ’s figure at all.

And the large, Italianate man who radiated sunny good cheer, in a white and green T-shirt with a motto advising all and sundry that he wasn’t Irish but should be kissed nonetheless whatever, glimpsed through a pint at Keenans Pub in Tarmonbarry or Beirnes of Battlebridge in Roscommon Town, or seen across the dining room, sharply dressed and studying a menu with a keen and professional eye, at Durkins in Ballaghaderreen? There was no reason in the world to think that this could be Joey, this chance stranger who but bore a passing likeness to a friend who was sure on the other side of the grey Atlantic waters.

It was one thing, Nick thought, privately, for never a word of it to Howie would he say, and that because he loved him, it was one thing to know that the blessed dead, the faithful departed, still took a kindly interest in the doings of their family yet living; he had always felt that his own were watching over him, as Jane, God knew, did not. But it was not right that Howie should be worried that he was seeing things, and be disturbed even in the midst of his peace; and where Howie was concerned, no threat on earth or under it, nor any angel in God’s Heaven, was going to get past Nick if he but knew it. Nick began to keep an eye out of his own; and to think, hard. Standing next the arches of a cloister, or walking the grounds of the Abbey Country House Hotel that they had come to love so well, he would puzzle at it; and the folk passing would see the grand blond American godling, the tallness and fairness of him, and he with a notebook in the one hand and the other absently rumpling his thatch of gilt hair, a pencil in his teeth: and a fine sight they would think it, he to be taking notes of what Mother Ireland had to show her visitors. And all the while, he would be after puzzling at it, knowing that Howie was not mad nor going mad, knowing that Howie was not even so dependent on the other eight as to be seeing them in waking dreams, and they not there.

The golf course it was that seemed the most haunted by these apparitions, and it crowded whatever with the folk that came to play the newly rebuilt course at Mote Park. Day and again they would pass it, not thinking even of the others, and whiles Howie would see a glimpse of someone, gone by the time he turned to look. A wee dark man flailing in a bunker with an idiosyncratic jerkiness, for all the world like Chris suddenly transported to Ireland; or the man, or another like him, whom Howie had eyed before, angling for coarse fish or on the fairways at that same course, the man who could almost have been AJ; or the red-gold poll of a compact man with an easy stride, walking away from the tee with Brian’s very walk; or again a long lad dashing a fairway wood to the ground in disgust as his shot shanked away, and he a dead ringer at that distance for Justin.

But it was the most unsettling to see all the grand horsemen in their finery and glory, cantering along, and the sun behind them; and one of them riding with the seat that anywhere else would have been that only of Josh’s James. And with the turn of the season, the County Roscommon Hunt was preparing for its time, for October and the frost and the coolth and the hard earth and the blazoned leaves; and the hunters were exercising their mounts from Ballyfarnan to Carrowreagh, from Ballinlough to Elphin to Athlone. And in the midst of them a man whose profile even from the far distance was familiar, the straight, slightly aquiline nose of it under the helmet and the firm set of chin and jaw that gave a faint suggestion of Jefferson on a nickel. And then Howie heard it, and Nick heard it as well, and they hundreds of yards from the emerald turf and the grey stone wall the riders thundered towards. Faint but unmistakable, heard over the drum of hooves as the surging line leapt like salmon in the Liffey, power and grace in motion, and the man who looked like one not there, on the grand chestnut gelding: faint but unmistakable amidst the Irish hunters, not a cry of the hunting field there or across in England either, but the reverberant, wild Rebel Yell, and in an octave deeper than Lough Ree.

And for all that – but the alarms and excursions – a grand time of it were they having, and it Howie’s time and the time of the both of them together, free from care.

And curious it was, too, that in all that time they’d not been bothered. The other eight called them occasionally, casually, and the connections, while perfectly audible, were not so clear as to suggest that the others had indulged a madness of their own and shadowed them to Ireland, only to avoid them once there. But the usual distractions had all faded away, and all seemed quiet on the home front. Brian and LA, in fact, had relieved Nick’s mind in grand fashion by having – over Jane’s impotent objections, as the label had approved the idea in advance of her being ‘asked’ – taken it upon themselves to have Aaron spend some time with them, ostensibly to work with Brian on some tracks.

The most curious fact of all, for all that Roscommon is off the beaten track, was that they had not been pestered, even there without bodyguards in flat defiance of all orders. Nick tried not to let that worry him: it said more than he wanted it to, he feared, about their continuing fame. But Howie persuaded him that it was simply that there were few young people enough on the ground, as tourists, that the older folk were no fans of theirs whatever, that the local folk made a living by (and a virtue of) treating their guests the way their guests so clearly wished to be treated, and – most of all – that anyone who saw them, just as they themselves when they thought they saw one of the others there, no doubt did a double-take and then refused to believe their eyes.

It felt, somehow, as if there were a ring of protection around them, unseen guardians, angels on their shoulders, who would keep the crowding world at bay. But no doubt it was simply as Howie had said, that no one who thought for a moment that they were themselves would at all credit that they themselves would be there, alone, unannounced, and without an entourage, in the green heart of Ireland.

Nick was willing enough to be convinced, and the more so in that their time together was inexpressibly precious, passing sweet. Their days were filled with tenderness and good talk, and ever sweeter, deeper, companionable silences, as they grew each day more completely attuned to one another, needing fewer and fewer words. A look, a discreet brush of hand against hand, a twinkle in the eye, all now conveyed more than a thousand declamations could have done but a month before. And their nights, against crisp, cool linen, lit by the dancing play of glow and shadow from a cheerful coal fire upon the hearth, were fine as lace and strong as whiskey and gleam-glinting as the dew on the green grass of Ireland. They were young and in Ireland; they were young, and profoundly in love, a love whose passion and tenderness now fused and burgeoned, giving birth to something wholly new.

And there where the kindly spirit of Turlough Ó Carolan yet hovered over his best-loved land, there in County Roscommon where long the choir monks had sung and where the poet Goldsmith and the composer French had been bred and born, inspiration came upon Howie after long desuetude, and he not expecting to write a new song at all, at all. But write he did, lyrics he would never publish, lyrics he would that none but Nick should ever see and none but Nick and Caro and God and His saints hear but the once, on Cashel at sunrise. Lyrics set to the music of Carolan, that grave music that had all the ancient minstrelsy of Ireland in it and all the delicacy of the harpsichord of Carolan’s own time, music for harps more than merely mortal; and a song it was of praise, and a hymn of sorts. For lives lived and for peace and rest with the saints achieved; and for Caro, most of all.

And Nick was content and more than content, until they day they both thought they saw, and what was more, both swore they heard, their friend The Bass riding the fields of Ireland with the Roscommon Hunt.

It had been the Bass-perfect yell that had shaken Nick. Not only was he now certain that, if Howie were going mad, he was going mad alongside him; it was that auditory hallucinations, if hallucinations these were, were more ominous a symptom even than visual ones. And Nick was of the mind that while he might not be the brightest of them, he was by no means the one nearest madness. Which meant that something else was afoot, and he determined to track it down.

In the event, it did not take long; it was but three days before the date on which Howie purposed to ramble up Cashel and, as the dawn broke, play and sing his song in Ireland for Caro to hear, and she in Heaven. And that day, as if it were inevitable and they knowing that the time was fixed, he found what he had sought, in answer to the questions that had plagued them both. A solid and corporeal answer, sitting unperturbed at a table in Horan’s Restaurant, calmly eating a grand meal and drinking his pint like a good man.

‘Wh-? What are you doing here?’

The Bass just gave him a patented, Spockishly-eyebrow-raised look. ‘A daily ritual. It is the custom of my people. We call it … “lunch.”’

And before Nick could say anything further, he felt a familiar arm across his shoulders, and a still more familiar warmth at his other side, burrowing in next to him, and getting Nick’s arm around the burrower’s own self: his friend Josh on his left and his baby brother Aaron, of all impossible people to be in a restaurant in Ireland, cuddling into him on his right. He had to sit down, quickly, before he fell down.

He opened and shut his mouth a few times, Josh laughing softly beside him and Aaron beaming up at him, and the Bass looking across the table at him with a smug placidity, before he could turn to Aaron and ask, ‘What – you’re supposed to be with Brian –’

‘He had an afternoon tee-time,’ Aaron grinned.

‘So we’re baby-settin’ today,’ James drawled, positively inviting Aaron’s protesting squawk.

Nick buried his head in his hands. ‘This is not happening.’

‘Have we intruded or bothered once?’ Josh didn’t sound as affronted as he might have.

‘No. But. My God, we thought we were going crazy, seeing your phantoms under every bed.’

‘You were spending time under –’

‘– James! Children present!’

Aaron snorted, and rolled his eyes. That, more than anything, convinced Nick that this was all real.

‘Guys. I. I’m speakless here. I mean, it’s great that you … I mean … it’s just that…. This. I thought you guys all understood. This was our time. Howard’s time ex-specially. Just for, well, us.’

‘Yeah, well,’ yet another all-too familiar voice said from behind him, gravelly and wry, ‘you want an ass to kick, Junior, it’s gonna be –’

‘Don’t you dare finish that song title, McLean.’

‘Yeah, yeah, Bassmaster.’ AJ eeled in between Aaron and James Lance. ‘Lookit, Nick-ay. We didn’t betray you guys. We haven’t even been in your sights, much less horning in.’

Nick snorted.

‘Okay, fine, so you can pick any one of us from across a packed stadium. But even then you didn’t know we were here, really, until we wanted you to know.’

‘But this was supposed to be our time. To ourselves.’

‘Hasn’t it been?’ When Josh asked a soft question with his eyes all kindly and his head on one side, it was impossible to answer angrily.

‘Well. Yeah. It mostly has. But –’

‘Honestly, Nick. You just set yourself there and think a minute. This here jaunt been the most trouble-free trip y’all ever took in your lives or ain’t it? Well, who in the Sam Hill do you think was runnin’ interference round y’all all this time, son? Rented out places so’s y’all wouldn’t run into tour-buses – all right, Josh, you want to “do as the Romans do when in Rome,” fine: “charabancs” – full of teenies when y’all went outside? Booked places so’s they wouldn’t be autograph hunters a-hidin’ in the potted plants?’

‘You mean – c’mon, Bassman, no way are all these other people here extras or something that you hired.’

‘Didn’t say that. But ain’t none of ’em inter’sted in you and D, on account of we went out and made sure to outbid any tour groups as looked like they might have fans and such amongst ’em. Cut deals with the damn Irish Tourist Board and ever’ last ho-tel in County Roscommon to make sure that while y’all were here, y’all wouldn’t hardly be nigh nobody else here under the age of forty. And whenever it looked like y’all might’ve been spotted, we made sure we heard tell of it first – porters and pub waitresses hear ever’thing, Nick, and don’t you forget it – and headed off the fans ourselves. First vacation I ever spent that I got writer’s cramp on, but we swore ary one of ’em to secrecy as a condition.’

‘How –’

AJ shook his head. Slowly. ‘You don’t want to know. One thing’s for shit-certain, with Bass around, first bullshitter don’t stand a chance. Brian’s having nightmares about having to answer for all these lies on Judgment Day. Word to the wise: we get home and anybody asks you about the rumors of our top-secret, African-debt-benefit joint project with U2, just smile mysteriously.’

The buxom waitress arriving with the next round smiled at Nick, with a sort of pity. ‘Faith, and isn’t it in Ireland you are now? How long was it we had the English here? Your friends can hide in plain sight: here a whole county can keep a secret. And to think last night it wasn’t but the half hour before you and your friend were here, and they’d just been leading the whole of the restaurant singing along to “Dublin In the Rare Ould Time.’”

The Bass smirked, and Nick just looked at him with awe.

‘So,’ said yet another familiar voice. Nick made up his mind right then that, from that day forward, he was going to use the Old West gunslinger’s trick of always taking a seat with his back to a corner and with all the doors and windows in his sight. This having-friends-and-bandmates-creep-up-on-you shit was scaring him out of a year’s growth.

‘Shit, Kev, warn a guy, will ya?’

‘Nice to see you, too, Nicky. Hey, AC. Aidge. Syncers.’

The Bass flipped him the finger.

‘Anyone else due?’ AJ asked.

‘Nope. So far it’s still evens with Brian and J, but CK’s only one down so far, and they were just putting-out at the third when I left.’

‘Don’t want to talk about it,’ AJ said, with a pout. He’d been eliminated in the previous day’s match-play round.

‘So,’ Kevin said again, turning to Nick. ‘D written anything to go with his planned ramble?’

‘Jesus Christ, you and James there paying off the hotel staff to look in the wastepaper baskets?’

‘Get a grip, Junior. We don’t know D as well as you know D – in some ways –’

‘Dear God I should hope not,’ James Lance said. AJ grinned at him. ‘But, Jesus Christ and Gen’ral Jackson,’ said the Bassman, ‘we sure-God know him well enough to know how his mind works.’

‘Then you ought to know that he meant it when he said this was for us. Something for us, and. For Caro.’ Nick was getting a little hot about this. ‘He trusted you guys, we both did. And. And here you are trying to make this yours when it’s not, it wasn’t, it was his and mine. And. Fuck.’

Aaron snickered. Nick slapped his hand over his own mouth, belatedly.

‘I’ve heard it before, Nick,’ Aaron said. He worked the Winsome Baby Brother look for good measure. ‘It’s cool; I won’t say anything.’

Kevin transfixed Nick with a gaze, leaning forward and speaking with the gravity he reserved for the most important things in his life. ‘Nick. You know and Howie knows that we would never betray you. Either of you. Much less the two of y’all together. But if I know Howie, he’s written something. And he plans to sing it, just once, ever, for Caro. Now. You look into your heart and you think about what is in his heart. If you truly feel that Howie wants to sing that song alone, then that’s how it will be. But if you think that he just might – whether he knows it consciously or not – want those of us who love y’all there for that one time, then, well. You think about it.’

‘And think fairly quickly,’ Josh said, gently. ‘We know he’s, like, about ready to do this, and we’d like time to get our parts down, man.’

‘Besides,’ Alex said, ‘been all great for these guys, but, yeah, we get treated well once the people here meet us and find out we’re Americans, but, y’know, until then, Critter and I get wary looks, people thinking that with our last names we might be maybe from Ulster.’

Nick stared at them all, then rose abruptly, absently stroking Aaron’s hair. ‘You guys. I. Hide yourselves better, okay? I’m not going to say anything to Howard right now. And. I gotta think about this. What you’re offering … whether I go with it or not, it’s. Okay, it blows me away that you guys came and did all this just for us, just on an off-chance. I’ll think about it. I’ll know by tonight –’

‘We’ll find you,’ said the Bass, with a quirk of his mouth that was not quite a grin.

‘Yeah, I bet you will, too. Make it morning, maybe. But whichever it is, the decision, I mean, I love you all. I really do.’ He hunkered down and flicked his brother on the ear. ‘And you, squirt. Behave and don’t give them any trouble. They got all they needed of that when I was your age. Love ya, bro.’ And he hugged Aaron quickly and walked very rapidly out of the room.

That night, as Nick and Howie waited for their hearts to steady, the fire casting ruddy glints off Howie’s body as Nick, legs tightly wrapped around Howie, held him pinioned, spent, within him, Nick ventured a question.

‘Howard?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Would you feel. I dunno. Violan-, vileat-, shit, violated? If someone else hears your song?’

‘You mean, if someone passes while I am offering it up to Caro, that morning? No. No, mi querido, I don’t think so. ¿Por que?’

‘It’s good. And. You don’t want anybody to know about it even though it’s good.’

‘Baby. It’s not like that. I would gladly have the whole Vatican choir sing it with us. But they are not here. It’s not that the music isn’t good, I think. I mean, I’m not saying that right, because it sounds as if I am bragging. But – it is my best, I know that, because I could not offer it if it weren’t. And I am not ashamed of it. But it is … it is for this one time only, ever. And you and I are the only ones here to offer it. And that is all I really need anyway, because you and I are our world.’ Howie smiled and nuzzled Nick’s nose. ‘Sure, if, y’know, a choir of angels shows up and starts singing along, I certainly won’t complain. But I think we can do just fine by ourselves.’

The next morning, before Howie was out of the shower, Nick was unexpectedly wakeful. And ready for breakfast, downstairs. What he was not ready for was for Joey, Justin, and Brian to show up at his door.

‘D still in the shower? We heard the water running as we were lurking.’

‘You’re going to give me a fucking heart attack!’ It is theoretically impossible to hiss a whisper that has no sibilants in it, but Nick did his best.

‘We just wanted to tell you that we were okay with it if you decided we should back off.’

‘Um. Yeah. I decided.’

‘Okay, then –’

‘I decided this was right and we need you and Howie will be happy. So. Shit, I don’t have copies, and there’s no time –’

‘We have the melody, man. Printed and distributed. Here’s the Bassman’s fax number: just get him the lyrics. Later, Frack.’

And they were gone, and Nick standing against the door when he’d closed it, heart thudding within him, and all just in time for Howie to turn off the water in the shower.

The morning came, cool and brisk, the air fresh-laved by the winds and the dew, the spicy scent of autumn in it. It was just before dawn, and they on the peak of Cashel, all Ireland, it seemed, spread out before them, and her who loved the old music by them, though unseen. And Howard with his harp, and Nick standing beside him, a hand on his shoulder, comforting.

‘I’m going to play it through once,’ Howie said, quietly, ‘only the harp. And then the second time with the lyrics.’

And Nick heard a faint rustling behind them that could well have been small creatures of the field about their morning rounds – but that he knew it wasn’t. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘She’s. She’s going to love it, babe. And I love you.’

Howie rested his cheek briefly against Nick’s hand, there on his shoulder, then squared himself.

Thrush and finch gave voice as the first rays of morning passed the horizon, and Howie put his hand to the strings of the clarsach. Stately, grave but not sad, joyous and restrained, all the wild soul of Ireland expressed in the Augustan strains of Handel’s time, the music greeted the dawn, and Nick listened with a hitch in his voice and a tear in his eye. Howie took a deep breath, and began again, and as Nick joined in on the second line so too did nine other voices, not harmonizing, not knowing what harmonies Howie had intended, but polyphonic, each singing the melody transposed by fifths or thirds or sevenths or octaves, each chording with the other eight and falling naturally into place with Nick’s and Howie’s tenors.

Aaron, and Chris and Justin and Josh and Brian; Alex and Joe; Kev and Josh’s James underpinning them all. And for a moment Howie’s hand almost faltered upon the strings and his voice almost caught in his throat; and Nick’s hand on his shoulder squeezed a wee bit-een, and Howie felt nothing but great gratitude and love well up within him; and they sang their song for Caro as the dawn broke over Ireland, and they on the peak of Cashel with their faces to the sun.

END