A Pint of Plain

by Bill Barich

  Today, Sligo has about eighteen thousand residents, the largest city in the northwest. With its concentration of restaurants, clubs, theaters, and so on, it resembles a miniature Dublin, and its pubs, nearly fifty of them, must compete just as fiercely for business. Agriculture still contributes to the economy, but not in the same dominant way it once did. After you creep through the downtown streets and cross over the Garavogue River, you’ve entered Yeats Country proper. (I passed a sign for Oliver Goldsmith Country on the N4, but nobody was rushing toward Longford. She Stoops to Conquer lacks the panache of Innisfree.) The sky seems to expand, the air tastes fresher, and the poet’s beloved Benbulben looms ahead, a magnificent table mountain composed of limestone and shale, with jagged outcrops that catch the light or vanish in shade as the clouds sail by.

  When Yeats died on the French Riviera in 1939, he was buried in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, but he instructed his wife George to “plant” him in Sligo after the newspapers had forgotten him, and he was reinterred at Drumcliff a decade later. Tour buses jam the churchyard’s parking lot in summer, but the high season was over, so I had the grounds mostly to myself. As I kicked through piles of leaves and heard the wind whistle along the face of Benbulben, I recited some favorite lines and also remembered, weirdly, the Cranberries’ “Yeat’s [sic] Grave.” “Sad that Maud Gonne couldn’t stay,” they sang, “but she had MacBride anyway.” The sacred mingled with the profane at Drumcliff—in my mind, anyway—but that probably wouldn’t have bothered Yeats. After he underwent the Steinach operation, a form of vasectomy (no monkey glands involved), at the age of sixty-nine, he began a raging affair with Margot Ruddock, a poet, singer, and actress, and even snuck some of her work into the Oxford Book of Modern Verse as its editor.

  Inevitably, a Yeats Country Tavern lay just down the road, and I later noticed his name slapped onto other bars, hotels, and gift shops to create an utterly prosaic anti-poetry that would have been even more offensive if it hadn’t been so predictable. The shameless exploitation of dead Irish writers for commercial purposes was a national scandal, really, when you consider that most visitors had never read a word they put to paper. (The natives have to read a few words, at least, to pass their school exams.) I was glad to leave the morass and turn onto the road to Lissadell, my destination, formerly the ancestral home of the Gore-Booths, whose daughters Eva and Constance were intimates of the young Yeats. He appears to have lusted after them, as evidenced by his poem “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz.” Con, the more rebellious, had married and divorced a Polish count, and was a hero of the Easter Rising.

  The light of evening, Lissadell,

  Great windows open to the south,

  Two girls in kimonos, both

  Beautiful, one a gazelle.

  I drove through little Carney, where the two pubs had not yet opened their doors and another new tract of houses looked down on them from a hillside. Rounding toward Lissadell, I caught glimpses of the Atlantic, and October sunshine on biscuit-colored beaches. More leaves in their autumn glory swirled and danced. When the Gore-Booths sold their estate in 2003, Charles Crockatt had the foresight and the nerve to buy a two-acre parcel with a derelict cottage that would have terrified a lesser fellow. Charles is a capable type, though, and he’s blessed with a pioneer spirit and a can-do attitude. The cottage needed everything from a roof to new plumbing and wiring, but he made it habitable and then comfortable, and now he hoped to finish a two-bedroom extension before Christmas, doing most of the work himself.

  I found Charles in the kitchen when I arrived. He’s a wiry, athletic man, and he hovered over the stove, a reconditioned Aga, covered in plaster dust and cooking the kind of hearty lunch a worker deserves—a bacon sandwich on a baguette and some eggs baked in ramekins, followed by a cup of tea and a roll-up smoke from a pouch of Sweet Afton. Though Charles is a builder by trade, his enthusiasms are a better clue to his personality—bridge, tango, cricket, and yoga, I am consistently dazzled by his enlightened energies while I nod off over a book. Born in England, he migrated to Ireland in his youth and never looked back, marrying an Irish woman and starting a family. The country suits him, he says, and he seems to take a certain ease in the distance from his roots, a common attitude among expats.

  When Charles and I meet at Birchall’s for a drink, I adjust my schedule to his, since he favors the Irish pattern of going for a pint after dinner while I am a captive of the American cocktail hour, and we’d do the same tonight. There were three pubs within a five-mile radius of the cottage, each a stand-alone with no village or businesses nearby, and hence as rural as can be. It was possible that they might not all be open, Charles warned, because the publicans were whimsical about the hours they keep. Closing time is particularly fluid, and a “lock-in” to facilitate after-hours imbibing is a practice with a long, intrepid history. Also, the pubs were all part of the owners’ houses, just as in McPherson’s The Weir.

  After lunch, Charles returned to his labors, so I thought I’d drive out to the ocean for a walk on the beach, but I got waylaid at a crossroads where a white house advertised itself as McLeans, both a shop and a pub. McLeans opened at four if you believed a note on the front door, but it was already four fifteen and the door was still locked, confirming the advance intelligence I’d received. I sat at a picnic table outside to wait, and watched two donkeys slowly strip the grass from an adjacent field, an oddly engaging spectacle. A cat mewled in a brilliantly Barbie-pink house on the opposite corner, but the silence of the countryside was otherwise imperturbable, broken only by the noise of an occasional car.

  At four thirty, McLeans opened at last. The shop was the size of a shoebox and stocked with the staples of a convenience store. A door separated it from the pub, where I instantly established myself as the only customer and introduced myself to Helen McLean, an attractive woman of sixty, who’d been pulling pints for thirty-seven years. Her private life was secured behind another door that led into the house she shared with her husband Hugh. They had raised three sons together—the donkeys, Harry and Fred, had been the boys’ pets—but the boys were grown men now and all certified public accountants in Dublin, who only come back to Ballyscannel—the name of the crossroads—on weekends and have no interest in taking over when their parents retire, a tune I’d heard before.

  Hugh’s family had started the business. He joined us from time to time, shuttling between the shop and the pub, a trim, easygoing man with a hint of the accountant about him, too, that sense of accuracy and stability. He joked about the old farmers he had known as a child, who actually did smoke clay pipes and spit on the floor, whether or not any sawdust was spread to assist with the cleanup. The farmer Roddy Feehily came by horse and cart, and swore that the horse halted at McLeans of its own volition, refusing to move until its master had a drink. Ballyscannel was strictly a farm community then, but only two big farms were left. The livestock I’d seen belonged to hobbyists, Hugh told me, and they had jobs in Sligo and were commuters like those in Dromod.

  The pub hadn’t changed much since its inception. Hugh touches it up every couple of years, but only for cosmetic reasons. If two football teams chose to shake hands over some beer after a game, they couldn’t fit inside. There are five stools at the bar and three tables to the rear, although nobody ever sits at them, even when the stools are taken. The regulars at McLeans are as hidebound and stubborn as all the rest, and they treat those tables as they might a spell in jail. Helen had spruced up the area with a photo of a Grand National winner scaling Beecher’s Brook, a tricky fence at Aintree Racecourse in Liverpool, that she’d inherited from an uncle who owned the horse, but it did no good. The men—most regulars are men—stayed put.

  Helen comes from Ballina on the River Moy in Mayo—the Irish give the “o” a lilt—and she’d met Hugh when she moved in with a sister in Sligo and took an office job. They used to go ballroom dancing in Bundoran, a seaside resort in Donegal, and she remembers the outings fondly. Ballyscannel in those days was s
till a village. Every Friday, a “traveling bank” dropped by the crossroads to distribute pension checks and other handouts from the government, and McLeans could barely cope with the overflow. The pub has no such windfalls at present, Hugh assured me, and yet his business was still quite decent. He earned more from the pub than the shop, in fact.

  That surprised me, since I expected a sob story to corroborate the statistics Paul Stevenson had trotted out. Hugh was sanguine for the moment, though, and maybe lucky. The drink-driving laws hadn’t undercut his trade, because the local police were being judicious. Only two officers were stationed at Grange, about ten miles away, and they could identify almost every car parked at McLeans and knew pretty much everything about the drivers. Hugh also counted on the loyalty of his customers, some of whom were old pals from high school and couldn’t live without the gossip. The newcomers to Ballyscannel didn’t have such deep ties to the community, so they used the pub less frequently.

  The first regular doddered into the pub around six o’clock, an elderly Brit in a tweed coat and cable-knit sweater, who looked every bit the country gent and needed only a sheepdog trailing him to complete the illusion. He asked Helen for a bottle of alcohol-free Beck’s beer and poured it over ice—many of the Irish do the same with their lager and cider—and unfolded the latest edition of the weekly Sligo Champion, a paper he’d once written for, and flipped through the pages. I tried to strike up a conversation, but his hearing aids were on the blink. He’d plunked them on the bar next to his beer bottle, but he did admit he loved Ballyscannel. The only way he’d ever leave, he said, was in a coffin.

  The sight of the Champion reminded Helen of an anecdote about a Canadian neighbor, who lit out for Ireland after his marriage fizzled. He grabbed a bundle of papers in Dublin and liked what he read about Sligo, so he toured the county and wound up in Ballyscannel by chance, where he bought a house. Helen and Hugh seemed to agree that the Canadian had been very fortunate, indeed, and that the charms of their little chunk of paradise couldn’t be overstated. They had no desire to see America and its treasures. Hugh’s one trip to the U.S.—to Orlando, Florida—had satisfied that urge forever, although Paris still appealed. Instead of a steady diet of travel, the McLeans had other plans for their golden years. When they sold the business, they intended to build a new house in a field three hundred yards away.

  Charles Crockatt is a creature of habit. He takes a mea sured, methodical approach to life and indulges in a hot bath when he completes his daily chores. Suffice it to say that he was very clean when he emerged from the steam and vapors, ready to guide us on a spin through the hinterlands. For ballast, we ate a dinner of strip loin steaks, Sligo spuds, and cabbage, after which Charles, who has a sweet tooth, dug into a berry pie. His metabolism allows him to exercise a cavalier disregard for calories, and he will even brag to you about his resting pulse rate if you let him. Our first stop would be Ellen’s, he told me, since I’d already been to McLeans on my own. Ellen’s had lots of, or possibly too much, character, and we’d go on from there to Jordans for our nightcap.

  We departed at nine thirty. The night was black and starless, with the mercury dropping toward freezing. Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed to drive, feeling obligated as the guest. The side roads, dangerous by day, could be lethal after dark, particularly for a stranger. They were no more isolated than usual, just too narrow. Two cars could squeeze by each other if neither driver panicked or suffered a drug-induced hallucination, but the shoulder as such didn’t exist at some junctions, and an informal game of chicken ensued. You backed up or your opponent did, and if you were the chicken, you prayed that no stoned kid in a fast car was approaching from behind—boy racers, Charles called them. Tall hedgerows lined the road on both sides at times, as well, blocking your peripheral vision, and you felt as if you were barreling blindly down a tunnel to oblivion.

  I proceeded gingerly, on the lookout for the police I was now convinced would arrest me even before I sipped the froth off a pint. I began to relax after about ten minutes, though, when I realized we hadn’t seen another car since leaving the cottage. My anxiety about the coppers subsided, too. It would take a dedicated officer to patrol the wilderness we were negotiating. Besides, the roads discouraged any automotive bravado unless you were a boy racer. On a cold night, with a threat of frost in the air, the two guys in Grange were more likely to sit by a warm stove and enjoy a cup of coffee rather than set up a checkpoint in—well, I didn’t have a clue where we were.

  Sadly, Charles was also baffled. “It’s the next right, or the one after that,” he guessed, a literal stab in the dark, and my anxiety returned with a vengeance. There were no signs for Ellen’s, of course, nor for any towns, but that wouldn’t have helped since Ellen’s wasn’t in a town. It was merely a pinprick of light in those otherwise vast black fields, and whether or not we’d ever locate it was a logical question to ask. I turned right, I turned left, and then I turned around. The roads all looked the same to me, and we surely traversed the same one twice. I almost wished for a policeman now, if only to ask for directions. Even Charles’s confidence had faltered, and he was making the first tentative steps toward admitting that we might be lost.

  Yet our salvation lay just around the next bend. Again the road looked identical to all the others, but Charles felt certain he’d nailed it at last. He sat forward in excitement, an arm extended in the manner of an explorer on the brink of a grand discovery—the source of the Nile, say—and pointed to the pinprick of light we were seeking. Ellen’s! We were both thrilled, and almost celebrated with some high fives. Like McLeans, Ellen’s was an ordinary house, but not as inviting. Rather than being bright and cheerful, it had a dour aspect and did little to disguise its primary function as a residence. It could have been a frontier outpost hunkered down in the face of hostile forces.

  Ellen’s was unique, all right, and appeared to be oblivious of the need to attract any customers—shebeen-like, really. There was a slight element of trespass when we entered, accentuated by the dim and gloomy lighting. It occurred to me that Ellen (if there was one) might be asleep somewhere, and I actually began to tiptoe for a few seconds until I came to my senses. Again I thought of The Weir. The pub was spooky enough to act as a set for the play, with the ghost stories flying. We passed through a small bar, where a TV once again blathered to an audience of vacant stools, and into the Long Hall, an underfurnished room spacious enough for a barn dance. Its centerpiece was a pool table, with a dartboard as backup. Only ghosts were shooting eight-ball, though, or aiming for the bull’s-eye.

  A chill cycled through the Long Hall, so we gravitated toward a stone fireplace where logs were blazing. A merry gent sat beside it, his cheeks flushed from the heat and as red as a Delicious apple, and he raised a hand to greet us like long-lost pals, but he may just have been lonely and hoping for some company. At ten thirty, Ellen’s had only three other stalwarts in attendance, each in solitary contemplation of his jar. Their mood was desultory, as if a night at the pub was a dreary job they meant to quit as soon as they could. Charles was puzzled. Ellen’s must have fallen on hard times, he reckoned, or endured a serious deprivation of the randomly distributed craic. In balmier days, folks from Sligo had crowded the place after a drive to the beach, but maybe they were too intimidated now and worried they’d have to evade a dragnet to avoid being collared.

  After my talk with the McLeans, I couldn’t tell how much of this was paranoia and how much a legitimate fear. Top o’ the Hill, on a busy highway, might be subject to constant scrutiny, but I doubted the patrol from Grange staked out Ellen’s very often. If they did, they could probably make arrests to their heart’s delight, and the same would be true at every other pub. Still, the myth of ceaseless surveillance had incredible power. Even some clergymen were scared of being apprehended, however accidentally. If a country priest conducted more than one Mass on a Sunday, shuttling between parishes, he might drink enough communion wine to be legally incapacitated, advised Father Brian d’
Arcy of Enniskillen.

  Some publicans grumbled that the whole situation smacked of hypocrisy. The cops were scarcely perfect human beings, after all. Edna O’Brien once told of a high-ranking officer on an inspection tour of County Clare, who visited a station in Corofin where his men had drunk all the kegs of poteen they’d confiscated from a bootlegger. When the desk sergeant rose to salute his superior, he toppled into a fireplace. The men had also cuffed three innocent women and compelled them to join the party, later locking them in a cell. As the officer left in disgust, he encountered the besotted sergeant again. “He started to argue with me on the footpath, with his private parts exposed,” the officer noted in his report. “Each syllable was punctuated by bursts of urine against the road.”

  Charles and I gradually warmed to Ellen’s. It might not be the liveliest pub around, although it could be if the craic deigned to return someday, but it still had a rustic appeal. The owners emerged from their quarters to chat with the three stalwarts, who became more animated, as if the attention had awakened them from a deep slumber, while we shot some pool and listened to the clatter of the balls echo through the Long Hall. The merry gent grew merrier and more flushed. We had wasted so much time during our period of being semi-lost that Charles deemed it unwise to carry out a second search for Jordans—though he knew exactly where it was—so we settled for a last pint at McLeans where, sure enough, about ten regulars gathered around the five barstools and shunned the tables at the rear.

  Of all the ill-advised decisions in my life, the one I made the next morning qualifies as the topper. Charles began to hammer floorboards after breakfast, perfectly content to have me idle by the Aga or take the beach walk I had postponed the day before, and later escort me to Jordans as planned, but I happened to glance at my map and notice that Cong was only about two hours away on the road to Galway—a good road, Charles assured me, where I’d experience no squeeze factor or involuntary games of chicken. Simply put, I couldn’t resist a look at the pub that the Quiet Man Movie Club had shipped over from Hollywood. My innocence had returned with a vengeance, and the romance of Ireland had me in its clutches once more.