A Tuneful Irish Tale

“Accomplished fingers begin to play./Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,/Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.”
– W. B. Yeats, Lapus Lazuli

The old man in the Irish cap sat on a chair on the sidewalk outside his house across from ours. I would usually see him on my way home from school. He would raise his shillelagh to greet me and sometimes played a tune on the penny whistle he kept on his lap. Often he was puffing on a pipe which I could smell even as I kept to my side of the street because he frightened me a bit, but when he played his fipple flute, the sounds of his playing enchanted my young ears. It struck some secret ancient chord in me.

One Saturday morning in spring when I came home wild with sweaty hot excitement from playing basketball in the schoolyard, I ran up our flight of twelve stone steps and froze on the landing before our wooden porch steps. To my shock, the Irishman was sitting on our porch, shaded by the canvas awning I had recently rolled down, a glittering one-eyed Cyclops to my young eyes. I ran into the house without giving him a nod.

My father was home and I told him the man from across the street was on the porch. He said it’s okay, he’s a friend, his name is Eamonn McGillicuddy, he was a good friend of my father’s and his brothers and sisters, your great uncles and aunts, and I’ve told him he can sit on the porch whenever he wants. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll introduce you to him.”

That was my introduction to the Irish rebel tradition, the man who taught me to never be bullied and to remember where our family came from and why. Something else as well – the power of music. And he taught me this while he showed me how to plant rows of potatoes, leeks, and peas in our back yard. I was eleven years old and our yard was quite barren except for a small beautiful Japanese maple tree my father had planted. Something soon blossomed in me and in the garden. To name it is to lose it.

Mr. McGillicuddy, as I always called him, had emigrated from western Cork, Ireland sometime in the 1920s, in the decade after the 1916 Easter Rising. Why he came I never learned. Much of what he told me had a vagueness to it, as if he were a man of many secrets. His brogue was still very strong, which, at first, made it a bit hard for me to understand him. After a while, in imitative young boy style, I too had a slight brogue as we became simpatico and he let me in on some of his secrets. Listening to his tales always reminded me of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver from Treasure Island, talking to young Jim Hawkins, as if we were treasure seekers, soon to be digging down in the earth for something to lift us up to the heavens.

My grandfather, his parents, and his eight siblings – four boys, all brawlers, and five girls in all – had lived from the 1890s in a large house in our Bronx neighborhood. The house stood on a slope backed by the Williamsbridge Reservoir, which was actually a natural saucer-shaped lake that was eventually drained in the 1930s and made into a park – the Williamsbridge Oval Park – by the Works Progress Administration. The house had a large garden with numerous fruit trees. By the time I met McGillicuddy, my grandfather and all his family had died and the house and garden, while still standing, had become derelict, with an old low-lying building up the slope from the house having become a hangout for local teenager boys when I became one. It was a place where fights would take place before an audience of dozens. Bloody boy rituals that served as our local Colosseum.

My great grandparents had emigrated from Cork because of the potato famine. The stories that came down to me were of a bitter family hatred for the English colonizers of Ireland and a love for all the Irish rebels who stood up to them over the years.

Mr. McGillicuddy was slightly younger than my great aunts and uncles. He never told me why he came to the US in the 1920s, and when I asked him, he only smiled and played a few notes on his penny whistle while doing an old man’s little pathetic jig that made me laugh.

He told me a lot, however, and much of it while showing me how to plant the garden. With each potato piece we pushed down in the hills that we had prepared on a slant – he emphasized the necessity of the slant – he would laugh and say to me, “Eddy, my boy, I must askew always, always askew; it’s all about the slant and sláinte, never straight, always askew,” and he would laugh maniacally. I never got his joke until one day he said, “Suppose I askew you this question,” and then it clicked, redundancy and all. And when we planted each potato, he told me a different tale about the potato famine and why the English were bastards.

The next door neighbor’s son, Mikey Fraina, had a huge German Shepard named Rex who was often locked in their adjacent yard. The dog always frightened me. It would bark and try to jump the fence. McGillicuddy would tell me if I was afraid of a dog, that dogs will bully me to death, and just like the English dogs and colonizers everywhere, you had to find a way to subdue them. One day he asked me to watch, and when Rex was at the fence with his front paws up on it, growling and showing his huge teeth, the old thin man walked over and started to play some eerie tune on his penny whistle. The dog’s eyes rolled in its head and he fell on its back with all four paws reaching for the sky to just surrender.

For weeks after that, I couldn’t sleep well, thinking of the incident. I kept hearing the uncanny sound of McGillicuddy’s playing as the dog’s eyes rolled back like pitched marbles.

Maybe a month later he did something similar with a squirrel that I often fed out of my hand against my mother’s wishes. The squirrel jumped off the pantry roof into the yard while we were checking the garden, and McGillicuddy quickly started to play his penny whistle. This time the tune was jig-like and festive and the squirrel started to dance upright on his hind legs, moving his front paws in circles. My mother heard it and looked out the pantry window, laughing. She was so shocked that she called my father at work and told him. He told her that McGillicuddy was a magician who could mesmerize anyone; that is why he was sent to the States. My mother was confused. I was overwhelmed with delightful shock.

As the season stretched on, I remember the vegetables growing, the leeks standing tall, the peas greening, and potatoes leafing and growing stems. The garden was flourishing but something went missing.

Sometime that late summer, Mr.McGillicuddy vanished. No one, not even my father, knew what happened to him. Even the neighbors, who had gotten used to his presence high about the street on our porch, the sound of his playing, and the feeling that he cast a cold eye down on them from his perch, missed him. They asked us but we had no answer.

One day while I was doing one of my chores, sweeping off the front porch, I found his penny whistle under the cushion of the chair where he used to sit. It was wrapped in a piece of paper with the words – “Tell it always, Eddy, with a slant and a fine tune. Sláinte!  It’s all music.”

I never learned to play the penny whistle, but whenever I sit down to use my fingers to play with words, I remember Mr. McGillicuddy’s glittering eyes as he played his magic flute. He came and went like a young boy’s dream, not a tattered coat upon a stick, but a soul-clapping apparition that remains, even as I sail into the country of old men.