An Irish Nor’easter
By Tim Danial Anderson
Copyright 2013
All Rights Reserved
In a coastal town on the southwest tip of Ireland, I sat in a pub while the rain cut my sightseeing short. Warm Caribbean currents were colliding with arctic air from the North Pole in thick fat drops that threatened to take out an eyelash. I walked into this particular pub because the thatched roof and 1746 painted in crumbling green paint on the door reminded me of some long ago time when people were only concerned with work as a means to drink. The aged lumber and Tudor-style would be a beacon to those men and women who picked potatoes all day and hated every minute of it. Age and history shaped into a pint of Guinness.
The pub was busy, everyone in this whole sleepy little town attracted to its scents and neon like moths. Unlike American bars where similar people drink similar drinks, Irish pubs draw a wide range of clientele from tweed suits to leather jackets, gray to purple hair, cricket players to soccer hooligans. I guess I was hoping to talk to someone. No matter how well a person copes with being alone in the world, there comes a time when a small acknowledgement is necessary to stop looking too deeply into one’s soul. Look too deep and the prickly currents of loneliness stir the flotsam and jetsam of life to the surface where the open air smells of dead dreams and rotting futures. I was treading water amidst the debris of my life; smelling the fetid scent of my wife’s perfume as it mixed with the stench of our divorce, the reek of my boring job, and the putrid mortgage payments for a colonial home I would no longer enjoy.
But the bartender was discussing fishing with a local at the end of the bar. So, alone, I sipped on my stout while I stared at the counter, looking at the carved initials, and the rounded dip in the wood from the hundreds of mugs of brew landed there throughout the decades. I rubbed my hand over the counter to feel the wavy grain of the wood, etched long before laminates and industrial epoxy resins could save it. Memorabilia from different bits of Irish pop culture hung on the back wall; a shillelagh, advertising shamrocks with the names of different beer companies printed in the green center, even a crouching leprechaun with the words “Kiss me I’m Irish” captioned out of his ass by some barkeep with a pair of scissors and a sense of humor.
The last time I left the United States was on our honeymoon twelve years earlier, a glorious romp through Paris spent mostly in the bedroom. While we walked arm in arm along the Left Bank I was sure we loved each other for who we were, not what we were. I would realize much later that my wife only wanted to go to Paris so she could tell her friends that she went to Paris on her honeymoon, romance had nothing to do with it. My parents were married for 48 years before my father died. I assumed we would last that long as well. On the empty horizon of alcohol-induced thought, I wonder if I was too naïve, too foolish, or too stupid to see the disintegration of our relationship or done anything to stop it.
It’s funny the things you think about doing for months, even years, the spontaneous acts that make love obvious. I left work early, something I’d never done in my whole career at the law firm; I told my secretary to reschedule all my Friday afternoon appointments for Monday. I decided to surprise my wife while the kids were at school, something I thought would be romantic, impulsive, the kind of thing she would need or want in a twelve-year marriage that had turned stale. The postman was ringing…apparently more than twice. She got the kids. I got their mortgage.
My trip to Ireland was an excuse to get away for a while; either that or a possible stalking charge existed in my future. I couldn’t help going over to my…our…their house. In our upscale neighborhood, the park across the street had a playground, a baseball diamond, plenty of tall trees that blocked the streetlights, and if I sat still and wore dark clothing I could blend into the landscape better than a ghost on a whitewashed house. From the sit and spin, I could see the bedrooms of my two children and the shadow of my wife as she took off her blouse before going to bed. If I was really lonely, I would bring a pair of binoculars and watch through the open living room curtain as the children played, or wait for the car to come home and see them run into the house. Half of me wanted to know that they were all right, the other half wanted to know what I had done wrong, if my kids still loved me, was the mailman a better lover and a whole host of neurotic questions with answers as sticky and lifeless as a mammoth in a tar pit.
My frequent flyer miles paid for the airfare. A “vacation” in Ireland was cheaper than most nine-day long trips I could have taken in the states, all of which would have led me straight back to Boston and the playground in only a day or two. I was obsessed and only an ocean could make it stop. For the last eight days, I had been more on a beer tasting tour of every deserted abbey, museum, and historical monument in Ireland than a vacation. This trip was penance for a whipped dog.
Almost everyone was watching a preliminary World Cup qualifier between the Irish national soccer team and some country in Africa. The siren stopped everything.
The once noisy, vibrant pub turned into a silent morgue. I could see the faces of everyone, their eyes searching for some sign of assurance. A low murmur spread over the room and the patrons bottomed their glasses while they put on their coats and grabbed for their umbrellas. The room evacuated like a laxative-laced Mexican dinner.
“What’s going on?” I asked the bartender, who now had time to talk.
“It’s the Nor’easter,” he said, as he began washing the long line of empty glasses on the counter in the metal sink below the bar.
It was late November. “Is it going to snow or something?”
“You’re American right?”
“Yes, I’m from outside of Boston.”
“A lotta good Irish there.”
“Yes. I know. I’m one of them.”
From the door, a young man shouted, “It’s on. They’re going for it tomorrow morning at eight o’clock.”
The bartender quickly grabbed the phone to spread the news. As he talked, the postman came in and dropped three bills, a postcard, and a couple flyers on the counter. Apparently, 1746 Corey Lane was the address of the pub. I hated him.
“What’s on?” I asked, sipping my stout, the espresso tang numbing my taste buds.
The bartender looked kind of sheepish, and he frowned and nervously pursed his lips as he tried to figure out a way to answer the question. The anxiousness on his face tightened my stomach and a sort of uneasy creep ran through my hair. His low, somber voice began a story I couldn’t quite believe.
“About a hundred years ago, during a mother of a Nor’easter, a fishing boat with eight men aboard sank out there,” he said, nodding to the Atlantic Ocean. “The small schooner was desperately trying to make it to the dock house at the end of the pier, sails ripped, hatch busted. It was a miracle they made it back to land, but yards away from the main boathouse, the tide shifted and the boat went out to sea again. The people from the village came out in gale force winds, but none of them would venture out to help the men in the boat. All they had to do was walk to the boathouse and throw them a rope with a lifebuoy. They stood on the shore watching as the boat listed from one side to the other, the relentless waves crashing against the hull. Eventually the boat sank killing all the men on board.”
He paused here as if the thought of some unspeakable injustice made editing the story necessary.
“The son of the richest man in the county Shamus O’ Donahue worked on that boat. He begged everyone on shore to help his son, but the winds of the Nor’easter were furious. The men on the boat tried to reach the dock house, but the sea was too rough, the main sail ripped from the mast leaving them with no power. The two-inch thick rope they cut from the main mast wasn’t long enough to reach the p
ost at the end of the pier even though they tried to lasso the deck like an American cowboy. The storm was too strong, the anchor the only thing holding them in place, but the churning sands let them go adrift again, the tide pushing them back out to sea. One man tried to swim ashore, and as his head went under the surf, no one ever saw him again. The others were too afraid to leave the boat and, as the water spilled over the broken hatch filling the hold, all the people on shore could do was watch as the boat went lower and lower into the fury. Shamus offered a hundred pounds, then a thousand to any man who would walk out on the dock with a rope and bring his son back to him. Nobody took him up on it.”
I nervously gulped a swig of Guinness, beginning to wonder if this was really a true story. The Irish had a way of stretching reality.
“What happened then?”
“They found his son’s body washed up on shore two days later. From that moment on, Shamus shut himself off from the town. The next year on the anniversary of the tragedy he stood on the shore and posted a sign during another monsoon of a Nor’easter. Twenty thousand pounds to any man brave enough to walk out to the boat house.”
“Did anyone get the money?”
“No. A few tried,
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