Blind Raftery Seven Nights of a Wake

By Peg Elliott Mayo

From the book...
When Father O'Looney was called to the hut of Blind Raftery to give him the last rites, the neighbors came along to give the old man a grand sendoff.
Sure, they said, it was time he felt the holy oil: he'd been that long with the faery that none would have predicted him seeking absolution at all. Not that the good people of Mayo, Sligo or Galway had any cause for bleating complaints about his dubious associates, benefiting as they did from his cohort.
Each mourner ducted his head coming through the low door while stepping of the wide stone sill into the black room. Smoke .. had sooted the gray stones and no coat of whitewash had ever brightened the the gloom. What use has a blind man for windows of glass or a red geranium catching the light, let alone going to the trouble of mixing the lime for the whitewash, him with his limp and all?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peg Elliott Mayo
• Release date: Jul 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476410494

Peg Elliott Mayo

Born March 31st,1929, Easter Sunday on the cusp of April Fools Day in the year the stock market died. So much for karma! Don, is the tall Shy Guy, spouse, creative force & phenomenal companion. Three living middle-aged offspring who are neither children nor “mine,” KT, Stan and Peter. When your “baby” is eligible for AARP you search for new descriptors. Three outstanding grand “children.” Jane and Anna Rose, college students, and Aaron a graphic designer, metal artist, gardener, creative force, all around good sport and friend. Home is a modest place on the banks of Coast Range Oregon river, 28 miles from “town.” I’m part of a mixed neo/retro hippie, artistic & staggeringly diverse forest community. Identity at various times: daughter, wife, widow, mother, grieving parent, Aries, failed factory worker, potter, basket maker, sewin’ fool, adequate organically-committed cook/food preserver, clinical social worker specializing in PTSD, loss, relationships & creative expression, hospice volunteer, tree hugging ecoappreciator, party girl, recluse, foolish risktaker, writer, computer graphics-photography neophyte, established writer & storyteller.

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BLIND RAFTERY

SEVEN NIGHTS OF A WAKE

Peg Elliott Mayo

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 1983/2013©

All rights reserved

Peg Elliott Mayo

[e-mail]

The cover is adapted from Faeries by Faude and Lee.

Others graphics from the work of Robert Gibbins

DEDICATION

To all attending Raftery's wake: particularly those attending Blind Raftery's wake, including the creatures lacking the empty bucket of small talk.

Don Pauls, David Feinstein, Jerry Campbell and Jill Current

without whom it would never have happened

Table of Contents

1. Raftery’s Promise

2. Tongue Clatter Rules

3. Lunacy

4. Grania’s Revenge

5. A Very Plethora of Tales

6. Maudie’s Terrible Suffering

7. The Burdens and Responsibilities of Barreling

8. Bliss in the Bog

9. The Miracle at the Heart of the Rose

10. A Little Child Speaks Undeniable Truth

11. Father O’Looney Reluctantly Delivers An Other Worldly Homily

1. RAFTERY'S PROMISE

When Father O’Looney was called to the hut of Blind Raftery to give him the last rites, the neighbors came along to give the old man a grand send-off.

Sure, they said, it was time he felt the Holy Oil. He’d been that long with the faery that none would have predicted him seeking absolution at all. Not that the good people of Mayo, Sligo, or Galway had any cause for bleating complaints about his dubious associates, benefiting as they did from his cohort.

Each mourner ducked a head coming through the low door while stepping over the wide stone sill into the black room. Smoke from the turf fire on the hearth had sooted the gray stones and no coat of whitewash had ever brightened the gloom. What use has a blind man for windows of glass or a red geranium catching the light, let alone going to the trouble of mixing the lime for whitewash, him with his limp and all.

The cow rolled over on her pile of clean straw. Raftery was a great one for taking care of animals. She had her end of the room, diked in with a rough stone sill the height of a man’s hip, and he had his end. The hearth fire in the middle sent smoke up through the hole in the thatch where chickens nested, content. A pig complained of the cold outside the door, while the tortoise-shell cat lay flat on her side, kittens lined up like fish in a barrel, sucking her dry.

Dying he was on a pile of straw not half as thick as the cow’s. Maudie McCully, the pinch-mouthed woman who was watching after him these last six years since his feet went out, said later that he’d ordered her to take his road-weary pampooties apart. She’d taken knife and old shoes in hand, wondering what kind of foolishness had taken the old man’s head, when what happened but the knife crumbled up like a chicken bone in a pig’s jaw!

She cried out with no small volume and indignation! The palm of her paw was branded with a tangled web of interlocking twines that ran right up her thumb where she’d grasped the knife. Ever after, Maudie McCully never could hold a piece of iron, be it kettle, knife, or door latch, without a thrill passing over her as when finding a rat in the hen’s nest or as if someone was hewing her tombstone. Holding the cowhide pampooties — the cow having recent shed the skin during an altercation with Tom McCully’s scythe — Maudie screeched like a hen two flops ahead of the dog.

What is it Maudie? Asked Raftery from the straw, Did you use a common iron knife on my pampootie?

Aye, it being more the tool than my few poor teeth! Now the knife has turned to sick meat and my hand has got the mark of some pagan tracin’s burned in it. Can you wonder I let loose a hoot of wonderment?

Maudie had a sharp tongue in her face, the better to flay the hides of men, them being inclined to brew poteen more than mulch the taties with seareek and needing constant reminder of their duties.

Aye, woman, can’t you see the breath is leavin’ me? Let rest your verbal commotion and mind your manners in the presence of the dying. Faery hates iron, and it’s faery has made my pampooties different than them that don’t have a thick gold coin sewed in the sole.

Maudie snapped her trap fast at that, but her mind opened up to the possibilities as a whale opens its maw to a school of herring. Raftery, blind as he was since smallpox locked the lids on his eyes at age seven and three months, knew her thoughts. His time with the faery wasn’t altogether wasted and, besides, a blind man learns where the ditch is by the vapors wafting from it, not by falling in more than once or twice.

You’re a harsh woman, Maudie McCully, but you’ve been a good woman to me more often than not, so despite your terrible ignorance, I’ll see to it that you’re rewarded should you do your duty right. Do it wrong, and the whole force of the faery will come down on you in truth.

Raftery was not above planting his ideas in other people’s fields as he did to Maudie, who knew not whether to piously cross herself or reconsider attacking the pampootie with her dark ivories. A coin was plain to be felt between the inside and outside of the shoe — and it big enough to pass for a golden sovereign.

You’re talking delirium, Raftery, and like as not to cause a whole troop of faery to come troopin’ in — it’s the priest I’d best be gettin’.

Be not so fast to oil me with the bland juice of absolution, Maudie. There’s Genevieve and Cromwell and the old gray hen to deal with, let alone Sweet Deirdre and Strong Bow.

At his name, the mongrel lifted his head from the floor where he was watching the old man go pallid as a jellyfish — and that stranded high above the waterline following a great storm sweeping up from the coast of Spain.

What of them? If’n I’m to be rewarded, sure I’d like the cow, what with you having no relations and all —

Listen to me wisely, old woman, and it’ll be the better for you. With that, he half sat up and in hollow voice, one associated with deep sea caverns and wells, spoke like the master of a great house giving out an inheritance. None of my animals shall leave here, Maudie McCully. Didn’t I get Genevieve with her cinnamon-smelling milk in a fair trade for a special tune fiddled at the Rath of Shee two Midsummer Eves past? Others have their stories, but breath comes hard. That coin is yours, under certain statutes and conditions.

Maudie thought nothing of the terribleness of a dying man talking faery business when the priest should be riding shank’s mare across the hills to him. No, Maudie pressed her small intelligence across the room, dragging Raftery from contemplation of the rills in his chest and the sloshing sound of his lagging heart. Tell me, man, what is to be done to possess this coin?

May your deathbed be surrounded by the ghosts of your own misdeeds, Maudie. May your grave be dug in wet sand where the horse crabs scuttle, if you fail me now. Three things you will do, keeping the pampootie in your possession at all times. When all the tasks are done, you’ll find the coin safe in your own fist one morning on awakening. Meanwhile, what is needed will be provided.

First, each of the animals, including the hen and old Cromwell with his loud shouting song are to live a life of ease, with fresh water and bedding and the best of food — including fish heads every Friday for Queen Maeve, whether she has kittens or not. None shall be taken from our den here until their course is run. Woe to the man who seeks to slaughter Sweet Deirdre — a nicer piglet never grunted outside a man’s door.

Feed them, Maudie, see they have fresh water and what’s needed for a good life, and your own plate will never be empty. Your bed won’t have fleas and your well won’t stink. Lay one rough hand to any of them, play the laggard on doing your duties, or let harm come their way and rat hair will fall in your soup, your knees won’t leave a praying position, and you’ll give birth to three newts and a frog on the day of your own death.

Second, for my wake, you’re to gather the neighbors seven nights running. Each night seven songs will be sung in memoriam, seven kinds of cakes eaten, seven glass of the Good Stuff drunk in toast to my blessed memory, and seven stories told, one at least each night. The stories will show my character off in a pleasin’ light. Seven old women will keen as though sending all their sons into exile. Seven pipers will flail the air until all present have taken aboard enough of the Good Stuff to tire of the lamenting and then they’ll oblige with hornpipe or jig.

Through it all, the fiddlers of the countryside will stand at one side and play songs that fit the stories, so that all may wonder at the wake of Blind Raftery and remember my doings at least until they’re planted themselves.

At the end of the seventh night, each one present will lay a hand on my fiddle, listening the whole time with heads cocked to one side. I’ll play a tune from heaven — or wherever I find myself — that will bring a blessing of a peculiar nature to them as hears.

Maudie McCully’s eyes rolled like glass marbles in a pan, the strangeness of Raftery’s words taxing her capacity to gesticulate. The old man rubbed his beak with a withered bird claw hand and said, For your part, Maudie, you are to see no plate goes empty, no mug allowed to show bottom. Let there be three bowls of rough cut smoke, clay pipes aplenty for picking up coals to light the sweet odors. Pile the sods high so the fire doesn’t die the whole time, and get three brass lamps for them as can see and ten stools, each with a lambs-wool cushion. The stools are for the old folks. See that no able-bodied youth should crowd them off.

Do this, Maudie, and your hair will shine like a young girl’s. Your skin will pull itself up tight again holding your inside stuffin’s together in the taut, pleasing fashion of a maiden of sixteen, and her ripe for marrying.

Additionally and furthermore, the hoarseness of too many pipes of rough-cut hay smoked will give way to the lilting tones of a nightingale. Fail, and your dugs will bounce against your knees, your hide will grow long quills, and every breath of your chest will whistle a banshee chorus tuning up for a long haunt across the mountains on All Saint’s Eve. Will you do this Maudie?

The old man was exhausted after his performnation. His eyes sunk into hollows the size of a fist, the folds of his eyelids raddled like a toad’s.

Maudie considered her choices and spoke right up, I’ll do it Raftery, you can count on me.

The old man let