by Thomas Belton
(1860 – On the Morris Canal, New Jersey)
Ma had long beautiful auburn hair and sometimes when Da would stretch his legs ashore to twitch the mules onward as they pulled our coal-laden barge along the Morris Canal, I would sit behind her high upon the tiller-box and brush it out with a boar-bristle brush she’d ordered from the Sear Roebuck catalog in Philadelphia. Annie O’Rourke was Ma’s name and her hair shone like a million copper pennies in the sunlight, thick and lush it was and filled with a fire that near flew through my fingers as it seemed to stroke me mor’n the brush stroked her. And when I got tired, she’d change places and brush out my long black tresses as dark as India ink as I grabbed the tiller, grooming me with caresses as deep and as dark as love could fill, a warmth that grew like some unseen protective presence in my chest even as I kept a clear view and mightily steered that barge through the great lily pad fields and green soupy waters of the lowland marshes.
She’d a lovely voice too, Annie, with a deep throaty edge to it that my friend Otto called a Contralto. Sometimes she’d sing me old jump-rope tunes from her early life in New York City as I hopped on one foot through a spinning rope she’d tied to a bollard. Tunes she’s learned with her particular girlfriend Ellen Hirst on the sidewalks of New York. She sang:
‘I like coffee, I like tea,
I like sitting on Bobby Jones’ knee.
Salute to the king, and bow to the queen,
Now turn your back on the Travelers Queen.’
Now you’d never think to see Travelers in the Appalachian Highlands of New Jersey in 1860, the year before the War of Secession started, but that’s the kind of magic Da could pull outta his hat, he’d a mind to. For you never knew when you might need help on the Morris Canal, especially with the Mules, so my Da was ever on the lookout for Travelers; those rootless Tinkers come from Ireland, who moved from town to town in their strange round wagons; shaped like little elf houses on wheels they were, with smokestacks puffing great clouts of black smoke from the little chimney pipes in their arching roofs, a jangling choir of shiny tin pots and pans hanging from their sides that echoed a curious wood anvil song all along the mountain steps, announcing themselves wherever they traveled; their Caravans sometimes ten or twenty wagons strong, ever crossing the backwoods lanes in search of commerce and secluded camps.
The Traveler men had their own wagons, small flat-bedded chariots with thin wheels and swift ponies to pull ‘em. Da said the men liked to race them, and wagered great amounts of trading goods on the outcome. The Tinker Men usually rode ahead of the Caravans in their pony carts announcing the advancing column of travelers to the secluded hamlets and homesteads that lay all along their secret Appalachian Highland trails. There they’d blacksmith some, fix metal goods some, sell baskets and jewelry, and play the bagpipes and sing ancient Celtic songs in the town squares for Weddings and Christening Feasts.
One day, when we lost a shoe on our best mule, Eliza, in the midst of nowhere and had none to repair it, Da somehow knew just where to find them; saw signs of encampment where there should be none. So, he gave Ma leave to commence her washing as we un-harnessed the limping mule and pulled her behind us through the uncharted tracks of sweet-smelling evergreen and luminous birch stands that rose above the Morris Canal and the rising saddles of land. I knew we’d found them when Ellie whinnied and a hello-ing neigh came out of the stand of trees above us. It was there we walked into a clearing and found a set of wagons arrayed in a circle festooned with dryin’ bloomers, children togs and slabs of salted meat that were dressed and a-dryin’ in the sun. A paddock filled with a dozen Tinker Cobs filled one side of the clearing, and me Da made his way towards it, and to a Blacksmith who was pounding out a tattoo on a portable anvil attached to the back of his small cart.
First of all, I must tell you that the Travelers Cobs are a strange breed of horse apart and only known to the Tinkers. Piebald ponies with broad blazoned patches of black and white, they possess the longest and strangest manes I’ve ever seen on a horse. The Tinkers liked the forelock manes to hang down over the horse’s eyes half way to the ground. From a distance they looked like a gaggle of ladies washin’ and a dryin’ their hair by the river on a Saturday night before a Caileag Dance. And the horse’s fetlocks, they too were hung with long hair that started at the knees and dragged aground like fur boots dusting the country lanes. It was on these sturdy beasts that the Travelers made their way along the Appalachian spine from Maine to Virginia.
Ma says she’d heard the Travelers were really descended from a race of early Gaelic minstrels; whose ranks grew when Oliver Cromwell’s anti-papist forces ravaged Ireland in the 1600s. She said a few Irish Travelers immigrated to America and they still spoke a secret Traveler language called ‘Shelta’ with bits of Gaelic, English, Greek, and Hebrew mixed in. Da said they were all devout Roman Catholics though who rarely married outside their own. For my part, I thought they were most wonderful and mysterious whenever we met them on the high trails. There was an old fellow in particular that had taken a shine to me; was very quaint in the way he talked, like he was always expecting a lady to pop out of my clothes, instead of the scrape-kneed brat I was. Ma told me she felt he was taking care to show me the special person underneath. The Travelers called him the ‘Senacchee’ or the ‘Story Teller.’ His job in their strict company was to spin tales, tell stories, and keep the family histories alive through song. Not being much for book learning, the Tinkers mostly remembered things by listening to the Senacchee.
The Camp that day was all abuzz because there was to be a wedding. Maydee Smarnie was to marry her second cousin Ellsworth Teasdale. I’d met them a number of times but not much to talk to. Since we were there, the Senacchee asked us to join in the celebration. Da sent me back to fetch Ma, and she, on account of the specialty of the occasion brought out my dress and Da’s best suit, which she’d stored under the aft-cabin box seat, and then commenced to making a cake and some cinnamon buns for the Wedding Feast.
Later pulling on her good boots she handed me a small box to open. This was where Ma kept her special jewelry; pins with mother of pearl tips, hair clasps cut with marquisette decorations that glimmered like ice sparkles on a frozen waterfall, a bright red ruby she said GrandDa had given her when she received her First Communion, and a small bracelet that was her grandma’s before she was taken off in the Cholera of ’32. From the bottom of the box, she pulled loose a small piece of board to reveal a secret compartment that I’d never seen before and pulled out a small ‘Cameo’ with an engraved picture in white with a Wedgwood blue background. It showed the profile of a young man with deep-set eyes and a strong chin, his gaze going off to the right as if he was seeing something far away and mysterious. Turning it over I saw a dedication engraved on the back:
‘To Annie Rooney.
A Thousand Castles I’d Climb for You.’
From Timothy Hogan’
“What’s this, Ma?” I asked.
“Nothing!” she said, taking it from me quickly, “Just a face on a pin; someone who gave it to me a long time ago, and before I knew your father.”
And this was a strange new revelation for me; that Ma and Da could have had ‘beaus’ before they knew one another. Where would that leave me, I wondered, if they’d decided on someone else? Truly perplexing!
“Here it is,” Ma added gaily, pulling a silver hair pin from out the box, a bright blue opal on its blunt end. “This was given to me by my best friend, Ellen Hirst. I don’t think she’d mind if we transform it into a beautiful wedding present for our Traveler Bride.”
“Why Ma, it’s beautiful!” I cried, “and won’t Maylee be terribly impressive and so full of herself wearing such a gift on her Wedding Day.”
And so, it was, for later that evening when we were at the Tinkers camp with the rites of Matrimony behind us, and the bride right effusive over Ma’s present, the Senacchee was so overwhelmed by the gesture that he made a special place for our family at the head of a long trestle-table made of wagon doors. So, there we sat like eastern Potentates overlooking the entire Traveler Tribe stretching down both sides of us with their own tables, making a U-shaped banquet hall under the high oak trees a-rustling in the cool night air. There we were passed the first and best meats that were laid aloft on the trestle table and drank great draughts of bitters and stout, which the Travelers themselves had brewed in weeping vats they carried everywhere in the back of their wagons. Then, of course, they began to sing and storytelling for it is a custom at the feasts of the Travelers that each and every person of age must up and tell a story, sing a song, or tumble a few dance steps so as to share in the good spirits amongst all.
Da got up right away, smack in the thick of it, jumped up and began singin his fav’rite ditty about the Erie Canal; of course, called, ‘The Raging Canawl’:
‘Come, listen to my story, ye landsmen, one and all,
And I’ll sing to you the dangers of that raging Canawl;
For I am one of many who excepts a watery grave,
For I’ve been at the mercies of the wind and the waves.’
After a great deal of laughter and a round of toasts as Da finished and regained his seat, I felt it a great honor when the Senacchee asked me if I’d like to recite. Smiling at the old gent and looking quickly at Da for some spine, I nodded and stood up in my blue dress and white blouse, with my hands clenched by my sides to keep ‘em from shaking, and sang the song that Frenchy had sung to me not so long ago;
‘Une araignee’ sur le plancher
se tricotait des bottes
Un limacon dans son flacon
enfilait sa culotte.’
As I remember it was about a spider losing his pants and I was surprised when a few Travelers began to sing along as others pulled out instruments and accompanied me, one playing a Celtic harp, another a violin, a mandolin and tambour drums; till the hills about echoed with the silly song and then they all shouted back at me in happy accolades of French when I was done:
‘J’ai vu dans le ciel une mouche a’ miel
pincer sa guitar
Un rat tout confus sonner l’angelus
au son d’la fanare.
Then I noticed the startled look on Ma’s face, and she asked me, “Goodness, Marie O’Rourke, where on earth did you learn to sing French?”
Blushing I told her that Jacques D’Alecon Marquis back in Sergeantsville had taught it to me the night they’d gone to bed exhausted and left me to my own dinner. Da and Ma looked at each other then, and nodded, not wanting to discuss it further I guess in company and amidst such revelry. And besides the Senacchee then asked Ma if she’d perform something for us. So, nodding she got up and looking at me in a queer kind of way began to sing a song, a song that I’d never heard from her lips before:
“My young love said to me, ‘My mother won’t mind
And my father won’t slight you for your lack of kind.’
And he stepped away from me and this he did say,
‘It will not be long, love, till our wedding day.’
As he stepped away from me and he moved through the fair
And fondly I watched him move here and move there
And then he turned homeward with one star awake
Like the swan in the evening moves over the lake.
The people were saying, no two e’er were wed
But one had a sorrow that never was said
And I smiled as he passed with his goods and his gear
And that was the last that I saw of my dear.
Last night he came to me, my dead love came in
So softly he came that his feet made no din
As he laid his hand on me and this he did say,
‘It will not be long, love, ’til our wedding day.’
As he stepped away from me and he moved through the fair
And fondly I watched him move here and move there
And then he turned homeward with one star awake
Like the swan in the evening moves over the lake.”
And when she finished, the Travelers all sat amazed and thoughtful-quiet a few moments, as if Ma had stolen their breath away, or bewitched ‘em with the belief that every one of them that’d lost a lover in death could seen their faces a-watching from the darkness beyond the trees.
But then they all burst out in cheers and a-yelling that you would na’ believe; it shook the surrounding hills with echoes that ran back and forth across the darkness like Banshees riding in the night sky. Then up got Da a-laughing and seized Ma about her waist to spin her above the fire, so high that her dress flared out like a white cloud above the dancing flames as her feet a kicking a fairy tattoo upon the air.
“Henry O’Rourke!” she cried breathlessly, once he placed her down, “You’re acting the fool. And I’d be pleased if you’d kindly keep me a-ground the rest of the evening.”
“Dear ‘God in Heaven,’ woman,” he cried happily, “What would the Nuns say down below in Saint Pat’s Parish Hall, if they heard you sing such a ghostly tune?”
“Ah, it’s but a fairy tale, Henry. Just something to scare the babes with; and perhaps convince the ladies that a man may not always be about and care for them,” she added giving me a signifying look. “And besides I don’t think there’s a priest hidden here amongst us to condemn me.”
And perhaps in response to this, or as a sly joke, the Senacchee motioned for a young boy to get up and recite something in the secret Traveler’s cant of ‘Shelta.’ He sang:
‘Our gathra, who cradgies in the manyak-norch,
we turry kerrath about your moniker.
Let’s turry to the norch where your jeel cradgies,
and let your jeel shans get greydied.’
And seeing the puzzled look on my face the Senacchee winked and smiled, then wrinkling his ancient face up into a bright merry pucker he translated in a high falsetto voice:
‘Our Father who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.’
“Oh!” I shouted, clapping my hands in delight. “The Lords Prayer! I know it in Latin:
‘Pater noster, qui es in caelis,
Sanctificetur nomen tuum,
Adveniat regnum tuum,
Fiat voluntas tua,
Sicut in caelo et in terra.’
“Excellent!” the Senacchee said, throwing his head back to laugh. “For we Tinkers have found sometimes it’s best to wrap our prayers in secret languages, Marie, like Latin or Shelta.” Then pointing his finger up towards the darkness above the sparks flying off the great bonfire between the tables, he added, “For the devil is a tricky one and wants to know what we’re thinking.” Then looking at Ma with a crafty smile as if a new devilish thought had just popped into his head, he placed a long finger against the side of his nose – the ancient sign for warding off the evil eye – and added in a mischievous voice, “Can I tell you a story, Marie? One’s been passed down by the first Traveler; a story comes down as a living memory to all that walks this road we live upon. It too is about the Faerie world of ghosts, like yer Ma’s song. Would you like to hear it?”
” Yes,” I replied meekly, and slightly frightened, for his eyes seemed to enlarge and spark in the firelight, his tiny ancient body straightening and moving towards the firepit where he slowly turned and pierced each one of us to silence with a brazen look. It was as if a different person had come from within him; someone just waiting to get out and speak.
“It begins thus!” he began in a deep soothing voice that pulled us all along unawares: ‘There is a faerie creature as old as old is, as old as when the first men walked this weary world,’ the Senacchee said. As old as the first fishes that swam in the deepest holes of the sea, a creature so dark and cunning that few men know him when they sees him. His name is Pooka, and he is a shape-shifter, capable of turning himself into a goat or a magical black horse or even a giant eagle. He lives in the deep forest and usually in a goblin hole. Now a goblin hole is a deep dark rank thing filled with all the putrid droppings left behind by trolls and warthogs. And as everyone knows the Pooka is a trickster and a hateful one at that. Forever playing practical jokes and convincing gullible fellows to do things they would’na’ do in a stone’s throw. He hates people as he finds them in his woods a-night, especially farmers and miners, with all their clear-cutting of the woodlands and digging of holes in his fine earth, he feels humans are laying waste to his natural domain, and so anything he can do to scare them is just what the Frenchies call a ‘ruse le guerre,’ or a ruse of war.
There was a man named Daniel Finnegan who lived at the bottom of Holly Dale, just beyond the ford to Murray’s Gate. An old man he was too, with steely gray hair and a red bulbous nose, a flat head you coulda cooked an egg on when he got so hot and flustered a-times with his temper. He’d a mare horse named Marie, a shy little thing with soft green eyes and gay speckled fetlocks with white puffs that blew like Thursday’s mail you ever got her running. Now Daniel was known as a Fiddler and was often invited to play a Caileag dance or a wedding at the Parish Hall and even as far afield as the next County. And it was well known at these shindigs that he’d often find himself in his cups and would rely on Marie to get him home apace.
It was after a Wedding Feast, not like this one here, but at a great party in a High Manor House that he became a bit ‘under the clouds’ as they say, and as he left the party to make his way home he became lost, which was a hard thing to do for Daniel, a fellow raised both man and boy thereabouts, but none-the-less he found himself on a strange road at Midnight with no one at all to keep him company, ‘cept for a full moon blazing high overhead and a strange fairy light that beckoned him to gaze within the depths of a stream he was crossing; looked like a burnished Half Crown piece of gold.
Silly twit that he was, he had no idea he was looking at the reflection of the yellow moon in the creek beneath his horse’s hooves, and when he leans over to pick up the celestial coin, ‘Kerplunk!’ down he falls, full-clothed into the freezing water.
‘Halp,’ he cries. ‘Death alive!’ I’m drowning now! Will someone na’ help me?’ But it was nor good, so he decided to swim, which is peculiar, for until that very moment he had never swum a stroke in his life, and more amazed was it when his arms and legs come clean out of the water and he proceeds to breaststroke through the night sky like he was swimming the River Liffey. It’s then that he hears a strange silky voice over his shoulder, as slick as new mowed grass, but as deep and as grim as the tolling bell fer Good Friday services:
“And how are you this good night, Dan’l Finnegan?”
Amazed at this development, Daniel looked over his shoulder and sees that he is being carried through the night air by a prodigiously giant Eagle. As big as a Belfast house it was, with a wingspan could cover a whole barn rood, its claws like pruning hooks, and its long wicked black beak a set of sharp shears a clack-clacking away when he talked. But it was the eyes that told Daniel, that here was not an ordinary eagle. Its eyes glowed bright red with a green bilious edge, like a caldron of deep mischief; and it was then that Daniel Finnegan knew he’d been captured by the Pooka.
“Where are you taking me?” Daniel cried in fright.
And the Pooka replied, “Where do you want to go?
‘Daniel looks down and he sees the Manor House that he’d been playing his fiddle at falling far behind, and all the ladies and gents hunkering down in the out-crofts to sleep in the hay, or else sipping at their bottles as they walked home, so he shouts, “Take me back from whence I’ve come.”
“Assuredly!” said the Pooka, as it turned into a deft glide neat as a pin, but away from the Manor House, sweeping his wings up and down, taking Daniel higher and higher, the Moon getting bigger and bigger as they rose up and out into the darkness of the night sky.
“Halp!” Daniel hollered again. “Where the devil are you taking me?”
“Why Dan,” the Pooka said, “I’m taking you from ‘whence you’ve come,’ you poor sod. Didn’t you know that when God made all you Irish people, he’d run out of good red clay, so he used yellow Moon dust instead. A poor afterthought, but makes sense if you think upon how many of your kinsmen have been cast out ‘lunatic.’”
“Wait now Pooka, I meant back to the Manor House and ye know it.”
“Dan! Dan!” the Eagle said, looking askance at him, the way a pigeon does watching a garden cat, nervously shifting one good bird-eye to the next. “Did’na the good Nuns tell you to ‘Say what you mean!’ and ‘Mean what you say!’ back there in the Grammar School, and not to speak frivolously, and to mind yer P&Qs.”
Now the Moon at the time I am speaking of was shaped like the letter Q with a little hook hanging off the side that was made out of a whole oak tree. The belief amongst the Faerie Folk was that God had used the hook like a soup tureen handle when he poured out the moon dust to make the Irish, rattling it about like a salt shaker. It was to this hook that the Eagle eventually took Daniel and dropped him like a Budgie on a perch.
“Ya canna leave me here,” he cried.
“Oh, but I can, and I will, Dan,” he said amicably, hovering over him with his great wings sweeping up and down in the golden Moon glow. “You see a year ago didn’t you make ‘yer way to mount Benbulben and pull some chicks outta my nest?”
“Well yes; I mean no, no!” Dan’l lied to get out from under the Pooka
“Ah ‘yer a fibber, Dan’l,” the Pooka replied with forbearance. “Well consider us quits then. I nicked you fair and square, like you did mine. Now you can hang on the Moon cooling yer heels till doomsday crows three times over for all I care,” and away the Pooka flew like a thunderbolt, leaving poor Dan with his feet a hanging in the night air.
And I can tell you Dan began a bawling like a baby, so grief stricken was he, so beyond anyone’s help or caring. The Penances he promised the Good Lord; the Prayers he sent up; the horrible things he’d done that crossed his mind to convince him that he’d never see the Pearly Gates of Heaven, not with such sins as his on his soul – when all to his surprise, and right below his dangling feet, a door opens smack dab in the face of the Moon, and with a loud bang too, like old Luna was all hollow inside, and who walks out but the ‘Old Man in the Moon’ like he was climbing up the attic stairs, this great big bit of a man with a brushy white beard and wearing a great flaming coal lamp on his head like a miner back in Tipperary, and a great white sheet wrapped around his body for a robe.
“And a healthy good morrow to you, Dan’l Finnegan,” he says. “But by whose leave are you visiting me today? I don’t remember sending out invitations to tea and biscuits.”
“Saving your Honor’s presence,” Daniel began respectfully, “but it was of no wish of mine to come visiting today,” and he related the harrowing previous hours of his eventful adventures from the first moments playing his fiddle at the wedding in the Manor House to the false Golden Sovereign in the stream, his vain attempt at swimming, and his rescue and capture by the deceitful, abducting Pooka disguised as an Eagle, and lastly his abandonment for no apparent reason (he figured he’d keep his pilferage of the Eagle’s nest to himself) in the Moon Hook from which he was declaiming.
“Well, the ‘Man in the Moon’,” replied, “That’s indeed a woeful and pitiful story Dan. Worthy of a great Epic, it is. But Dan, ye canna’ stay there on that hook. You’re rocking my home something dreadful, and I canna take my bath it’s splashing around so much inside, what with all ‘yer bellowing and caterwauling about yer wrongs. Do if you please jump off.”
“Jump off! Indeed not!” Daniel huffed out and pulled himself down tighter against the protruding hook. “Are you daft, man? I’ll fall back the many miles to the hard ground below and surely kill myself, every bone in me body busted like a rack of kindling.”
“No concern of mine, Dan,” he said. “Now be off with you.”
“Nay, I’ll not,” Dan said. “And who’ll it be to put me off,” he added puffing his chest out like a rooster in heat.
And then without another word the ‘Man in the Moon’ repaired back down his steps again, as Daniel relaxed and figured he showed him ‘What for!’ when out comes ‘The Old Man’ again, stomping something dreadful mad and up the stairs with a monstrous meat-cleaver in his hand. Then without a How d’ya do, ‘Whack!’ he splits the Moon Hook in half, and before Daniel can offer up a ‘Jesus Mary and Joseph,’ he’s falling the long way back down to the grand blue planet below.
Looking up he sees the Old Man a smiling at him and shouting down, “Thank you for your visit, Dan. Always good to see ya! Next time would ye be so considerate as to bring some of them potato dumplings from Paddy Doran’s Public House on O’Connell Street in Sligo? I do love a good dumpling.”
And that was the last time Daniel Finnegan saw that wicked evil man who lives in the Moon, and he swore to himself as he fell that he’d never ever gainsay him any dumplings of his. He’d rather feed it to the sow and her piglets than let such a Blackguard as ‘The Man in the Moon’ get his victuals.
And as he fell, and he fell, he had time to take his bearings, so far and so headlong that he saw the white shores of Araby go by with their white sandy dunes that go on forever; then he saw the Elephant and Tigers wrestling on the green grassy plains of Asia as he tumbled past in a dark terrible funk at his predicament; and then he sees the good lord’s Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin sail by, and he knows its not far to his own home on that lovely green sward of Ireland, so he pulls out his shirttails and throws them up over his head like a ship’s sail and slowly floats his way down like a feather; down, down, and down he goes, but realizes too late that he’s missed his mark by a good mile and ‘Splash!’ he lands in Sligo Bay clear across the Green Isle.
Now poor Dan’l sinks and sinks, till at last he’s sitting on the bottom of Sligo Bay with his shirttails a hanging over his head, and his best Sunday suit all wet with the deep salt water, when up swims up a behemoth of a Great Blue Whale a-scratching hisself into a furor on account of Daniel has awakened him from a deep, dark sleep; so the behemoth starts to fanning Daniel with his prodigious tail, tumbling him end over end like he was a poor mole crab a spinning on his arse up the beach shingle when the tides coming in.
“Halp,” Daniel cries, as he’s rolled like a bug in the water, his overcoat, shirt and drawers a flapping about him like Tuesday’s wash in a stiff breeze on the strand. Then to Dan’s surprise, just when he thought it quits – time to meet the Good Lord himself with his heavenly host of angels singing and sweeping down to meet him with a trumpet of doom on his Judgment Day bellowing – just then a hole opens in the water directly in front of him, like a whirlpool it is, and out pops the face of the Pooka.
“Get up you brute!” the Pooka shouts. He’s disguised like a He-Goat now, with horns all twisted and curly and a tiny bit of beard that jiggles when he talks. “You daft be-sodden old man. Ridden me, have you, to the moon, and fallen in yer cups again, have you? Wake up and stay outta my forest, and dinna think of planting yer corn and potatoes in me fields. I’ll see you around, Dan’l Finnegan,” it finished with a snicker; and at that the whirlpool hole sucked Daniel up like a typhoon and spit him out on the other side, alive and washed ashore, but instead of the cold salt sea of Sligo Bay he was back at the stream he’d fallen into the night before, the very same place.
His good mare horse, Marie, was licking his face to get him up, the poor beast’s belly a pounding like a hollow drum with the hunger, a thumping for her oats aback of the barn, and she’s needing his Honor, asleep at her feet, to get up, awake and take her in arrears to the civilizing shelter of her paddock.
****
“And that my dears,” the Senacchee said with finality, as we came outta the trance he must’ve had us under, “That is why we Travelers wander. The Pooka is always afoote, and we must keep one step ahead, else we’ll find ourselves mooning over spilt milk. For that Goblin trickster,” he added, “He hates a settled house in his woods. Better to take your house with you as we’ve done,” the Senacchee noted, pointing at the gaily decorated Caravans that surrounded the bright campfire, “or on a Barge afloat,” he smiled at Da, who nodded in return, “and he canna find us for his life.”
Then the old man finished with a flourish of his hand and a courtly bow, which was met by a great roar of approvable from all our company. I looked over at Da, who was quietly smoking his pipe and shaking his head from side to side, and saw his sly smile as he got up and shook the Senacchee’s hand and begged them all a good night.
****
I thought of the Pooka story the next day as Da and Daniel Finnegan, for that was the Senacchee real name, were conversing on the steep trail down to the Canal when we were making our leaving. And it occurred to me that it wasn’t an old Irish Tale at all the Senacchee had told us the night before, but a new one that he’d made up on the spot or maybe embellished with all the pits and pats of conversation he’d heard the previous day.
Thinking on it, I heard Da’s seafaring stories in his tale, and Ma’s ghost story and big mansions down in the city, Maylee’s wedding feast, and even me with a small part to play as Marie the faithful Mare. I became amazed the more I thought on it. The Senacchee had us all in his story, moving us about, and jumping us all get out across the stage of his imagination. And I got lost in the idea, that while I was sitting there listening to the Senacchee, he was melting me down like yellow candle wax and casting me anew in a fresh mold, and singing me back to life again with a different, newer face; brighter colors for the trees and the sky; the story-people inside of him no less than the ragtag band of Tinkers that sat around the campfire, all of us trapped in his eyes as his song unraveled, his Fancy keeping us on the edge of our seats, all of us trapped in his fairy web of cast silken threads; for no man nor woman could rise up and break that fabulous chain till he was done with us.
And it occurred to me there was a kind of magic to the Senacchee’s way of story-telling. On the spot, making today’s facts fit into some faraway place, yet muddy with all the particulars of that long ago time, but sparkling and shiny with a proper new point of view. And it made me think that story-telling was something worth learning, an amazing new way to look at the world we lived in; maybe a way to capture the people I met on the High Piedmont in my imagination, make them more that they are, yet all of us in it together.
So, I decided right then and there to become a Senacchee.