Tho' It Were Ten Thousand Miles: A Love Story

By William H. A. Williams

Seamus ORoukes obsession with a girl he discovers on You Tube turns into love when Fiona MacKenzie turns up on his Midwestern campus. While the sixty-?ve-year-old Irishmans pursuit of this twenty-year-old folk singer is against all reason, rhyme does play its role. Seamus is adept at wielding poetry, as well as music, art, gourmet meals and ? ne wine, in his campaign for the heart of his green-eyed auburn-haired beauty.

Fiona is haunted by the earlier death of her Scottish father and by the resulting loneliness, which she tries to hide beneath her usually self-con?dent exterior. She tries to keep from being overwhelmed by Seamus larger-than-life personality. Gradually, however, her skeptical common sense gives way before the onslaught of this unreconstructed Irish Romantic.

During their brief months together, this age-crossed pair discovers that romance is a tightrope strung between incomprehension and farce. As told through a his/her dual narrative, these two head-strong and highly articulate individuals continuously collide, often comically, as they struggle to comprehend the nature of their love. In spite of moments of often bawdy comedy, questions of love, age, loss and death thread their way through the story. As Fiona observes, What strange ways love has of going about her business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456794958

William H. A. Williams

William H. A. Williams is a historian, writer and musician, living in Cincinnati. Tho’ It Were Ten Thousand Miles is his first work of fiction. The Irish elements in the novel—the male protagonist’s vocabulary and speech patterns, bits of folklore and songs, references to Dublin and the West of Ireland—are based on the author’s knowledge of and experiences in Ireland. In addition to American and German universities, Williams taught at University College, Dublin, and spent his summers in a thatched cottage in West Donegal. Apart from H. L. Mencken and H. L. Mencken Revisited (Twayne, 1977, 2001), most of Williams’ academic work has dealt with Ireland and Irish America. He is the author of ‘Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream: Images of Ireland and the Irish in American Popular Song Lyrics, 1800-1920 (University of Illinois Press; recipient of an ASCAP award, 1996) and Landscape, Tourism and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1750-1850 (Wisconsin University Press, 2008). His latest book, Inventing Irish Tourism, The First Century, 1750-1850, was published in 2010 (Anthem Press, UK). Williams edited for publication Daniel O’Connell, The British Press and the Irish Famine: Killing Remarks, written by my late wife, Leslie A. Williams (Ashgate Press, UK, 2003). The author was also a researcher and consultant for The Long Journey Home, the PBS series about Irish America. In addition to his academic work, Williams has also engaged in freelance journalism. His articles and reviews have appeared in Irish and in American newspapers and magazines. While in Ireland he wrote the monthly “Letter from Dublin” for the Baltimore Sun. Most recently, he has been a North American stringer for Irish Music Magazine. As a performer, Williams have presented his program of Irish-American songs at Irish festivals and on campuses around the country. His musical, Maggie Murphy’s Home, has been staged at the Milwaukee Irish Fest and in Cincinnati. He is a member of three folk groups, including Ceol Mhór, a Cincinnati-based Irish band.

Book preview

Tho’ It Were Ten Thousand Miles

A Love Story

William H. A. Williams

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AuthorHouse™

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Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2011 by William H. A. Williams

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 9/27/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4567-9497-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-9495-8 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-9496-5 (dj)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011915821

Printed in the United States of America

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Cover illustration by William H. A. Williams, III.

Contents

I: The Winter Spring

II: The Hungry Eye Sees Far

III: The Fairy Fish Girl

IV: Silver Apples, Golden Apples

V: Let Grief Be A Fallen Leaf

VI: In Which I Go Sit With Myself

VII: An Old Man Came Courting Me

VIII: Oul’ Wans And Chislers

IX: All The Things You Are

X: Adagio

XI: Plunging Down Through The Sea Of Fog

XII: Love, All Alike, No Season Knows Nor Clime

XIII: Making Room

XIV: Cailín Rua

XV: The Irish Penguin

XVI: I Ain’t Marching Anymore

XVII: The Long Night Of The Vermin

XVIII: Team Work

XIX: Love Between Beeps

XX: Santiago

XXI: How Do I Love Thee—And Why?

XXII: A Drop Of The Craythur

XXIII: A Goal Through The Iron Gates Of Life

XXIV: Christmas In August

XXV: Home

XXVI: Tea And Soliloquy

XXVII: Pangur Bán

XXVIII: The Winter Of Our Discontent

XXIX: The Rattling Of The Cages

XXX: Piecing Together, Making Whole

XXXI: Valediction

XXXII: Plaisir D’amour

XXXIII: The Madra Rua

XXXIV: Bare Ruined Choirs

XXXV: Slán Agus Beannacht

XXXVI: Tho’ It Were Ten Thousand Mile

About the Author

Standing alone in the doorway, can I bring myself to cross the threshold? The room looks so strange, lit only by the reflection of the moonlight shining on the new snow that came down today. It makes everything seem so weird, so ghostly. I can feel your presence, Seamus.

Ohmagod, what was that? Oh, Pangur Bawn, you poor kitty. I forgot all about you. Yes, I’ll get you some milk…and me some tea. I am going to need something warm. Here, let me turn on a light and turn up the thermostat a bit. Get some heat in here.

I would love a fire but…wait, it’s all set up in the fireplace…paper, kindling and split logs—everything. You must have made it up, Seamus, but didn’t light it…the last night…before …. Were you thinking of me…that I would take you to the hospital and, when I came back in the evening, alone, I could enjoy a nice cheery fire? I am afraid it won’t be very cheery tonight, but I am so cold. I’ll just light the paper and let it get started while I make some tea.

It has been a hard day, and yet at the same time a very good day, too. I don’t know how I got through the memorial service and the wake. But your friends were wonderful. I was afraid that some of them would not accept me, but they did.

Now I am tired, and…do I really want to read through all these pages you left for me? I feel I must, both for your sake…and for mine.

So much has happened since I came here nine months ago. I’m not the same girl who carried her guitar through that doorway back then. And you…Dear God, you are gone.

Yet it feels as if you are still here. That’s not good, love. You don’t want to hang around, haunting this cold, dark house. So, go, dear Ghost. I can deal with memories, and I will cherish yours. But I can’t deal with revenants. You taught me that word, and now you have become one.

I still have a life to live—a long one, I hope. And you…I’m so sorry, so terribly sorry…you have lived yours and exited it. So please, dear Ghost, move on to…wherever you are supposed to be—And, Oh God, let it be a good place, I pray.

And I will help you. I’ll take my cup of tea over here by the fire, which is really starting to burn. You always knew how to set a good fire. And Pangur Bawn, you settle down on my lap.

Tonight, sitting here before the fireplace where we first made love, I am going to read this manuscript…I guess it’s the story of our relationship, of our brief life together. As I finish each page, I will put it on the embers. And, as the pages go up in smoke, by dawn, you, dear Ghost, will please be gone, leaving me only my memory of you.

That by itself, God knows, will be enough for me to carry all the rest of my life.

I: The Winter Spring

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I have a few days and evenings before my operation. I am writing this so that I can relive what has happened over the past months. But to whom am I addressing this? Is it to you, my darling Fiona? If the operation goes well, I probably will not even show it to you. If it does not, will you want to read it? Well, for the moment, then, I suppose it will just be a lovely good night story I will tell myself.

But where does it start? My fellow countryman James Joyce opens his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man almost ad ovum…with a moocow coming along the road and meeting up with a nicens little boy named baby touckoo, the artist as a diapered infant.

Oh come on, Seamus. You’re not writing your autobiography, are you? This is supposed to be about us.

Well, perhaps no moocows…not that far back. Born in Ireland, immigrated to America with my parents, knocked around various towns and cities before settling into academia here in the Midwest at Elmsgrove—an interesting life to no one but myself… not even to me at this point,. No, that is not the story I want to tell.

Yet, I suppose all stories are a bit like peeling an onion—removing layer after layer, while shedding the odd tear. The trick in story telling is in knowing how far into the onion to go.

I suppose I should go back to my dream. However, I suspect that the dream itself had its origins in the looming headlands of my sixty-fifth birthday and my impending retirement.

As I approached 2006, I had decided to give up teaching. My academic life no longer held much interest for me. For one thing the students seemed to get dumber as year followed year.

And I tried so hard to get you to understand that we are NOT dumb! Yeah, we don’t know all the stuff you knew when you were in college, but we understand a lot of things that you never even thought of back then. After all, I was the one who showed you how to really find things on the Internet.

Or maybe it was just me getting dumber. Anyway, for whatever reason, it was time to shuffle on, although I did agree to accept emeritus status with the idea of teaching the occasional course in my field of Irish Studies

My birthday was another matter. It was either laugh or cry, celebrate or mourn. I chose celebration, or so I thought. I sorted through plans for a big bash—friends, music, lashings of drink.

Had my wife been alive, she would have organized a grand party for me. It would have been great gas. Alas, she died five years ago from leukemia. She was younger than I, and we had been married for only ten years. I guess I never really managed to deal with the loss. I had friends, of course, including some very nice ladies of uncertain ages whom I occasionally squired around…to no purpose except to fill in some lonely hours.

Anyway, I thought I had plenty of time to plan my birthday bash. However, as the big day approached, I found I didn’t have the energy to stage a celebration. In fact, I didn’t have energy for much of anything. I began to notice how easily I became short of breath on my daily walks. Steep hills, up which I had always managed to huff and puff, now demanded that I stop and pant every few feet. So, I decided to go to the doctor and ask for a stress test…which I promptly flunked.

Ah, you didn’t study, joked Dr. Chatterjee. I’ll bet he trots out that creaky jocosity for all his academic patients with similar problems. That was about as far as the jokes ran, however. He immediately slammed me into the hospital. But it’s my birthday tomorrow, I protested. No problem, he said. We’ll even give you a present. And they did—a stint in my left ventricle.

You spent your sixty-fifth birthday in the hospital! You never told me that. You poor dear. Last month I spent my twentieth-first birthday in bed with the flu, the way I spend almost every birthday. You and I clearly have had issues with celebrations.

I was only in the hospital for a few nights, and recuperation back home was easy enough. I was quickly back on me sprags and taking walks in no time, although I gave the steep hills a wide birth.

It was around that time, deep in the bowels of winter, that I started having a very strange recurring dream. I am walking in the woods—bare, black trees against eerily glowing snow that crunches beneath my feet. It is cold. I come across a small pool covered over with ice. It must be a spring because beneath the icy track that leads away from the pool, I can hear the sound of water gurgling down the hill.

The ice has made the spring itself opaque; the dull grey sheen of its surface reflecting a leaden sky. For some reason I take a rock and break through to the water underneath. As I move the pieces of ice aside with my blackthorn walking stick, I can see my reflection in the water—grizzled, tired, old, and wintery as the woods around me.

And then, suddenly, over my shoulder, the glimmer of… someone, barely glimpsed, more color than form—gold, amber, green…. Who or whatever it is never comes into focus and is gone in an instant. But I have the sense of something…no, someone…young and very beautiful. I look around, but no one is there.

I turn and follow the half-frozen stream that leads downhill away from the spring. As I walk, the snow begins to disappear. The stream eventually frees itself from the ice. Trees come into bud and then into fresh green leaf. Blossoms begin to appear. I have the sensation of walking from winter into spring. And then the dream ends.

It haunted me for a long time. Was it an omen of death? Or the promise of some portion of life yet to be lived. Or both?

When you first told me about that dream it kind of creeped me out. I have dreams like that, and they are both scary and wonderful, and I am never sure what they mean. But I wonder, did your imagination add that beautiful someone after you saw me?

Being a widower and living alone, I had plenty of time to dwell on such things. Too much time, and it was not healthy. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that the being I had sensed in my dream really existed. She…yes, I knew it was a woman…she was somewhere out there in the world, and, even more insane, I felt that somehow I could find her.

Well, that way madness lies. Although I am Irish, I do not usually wander around eejit-like in the misty Celtic Twilight. I had never taken dreams seriously before. So I tried to get the whole insane idea out of my head. I had almost succeeded when, one day, I did find her—via the Internet!

So, this is my cue. Enter, digital me. I always wondered how this whole thing started. You never really did explain how you found me.

I would have thought that I was the last man in the world who would fall in love virtually. Aged child of the World-War-II era seeks digital chick for unspeakable…whatever.

For a long time I was the classic curmudgeon who had to be dragged kicking and screaming onto the Age of the Internet. Begrudgingly, however, I began to use it; to look up things, to keep in touch with distant friends, even to occasionally buy some books on Amazon. Eventually, I discovered that I also could use the Internet to pursue my interest in folk music.

Although it is not my academic specialty, I have a long-standing love of traditional music. I was, in fact, a foot soldier, a musical grunt, in the vast army of guitar strummers and banjo pickers who haunted and plagued coffee houses and bars in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Hell, I used to pal around with the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem when they were singing at the White Horse Tavern in NYC. They were older than I was, of course, even Líam. But we had some great times.

Eventually, of course, the folk scene faded. The surviving coffee places were taken over by singer-song writers, the bane of the traditional musician, who thinks that all the good songs are past and gone.

Hey, I write songs, and you said that you liked them. You’re just being snobbish.

Nevertheless, I kept up with the music through graduate school, a stint in the army and my early years of college teaching. And folk music remained part of my social life, even after I got married. My wife had a nice voice, and we occasionally did some gigs, but mostly we sang at parties.

When she died, however, the music seemed to dry up along with a lot of other things in my life. Anyway, by then, most of the folk musicians around Elmsgrove were getting on, and it seemed as if the students could not care less about traditional songs.

Turning the millennial corner, however, it appeared as if the times they were a-changing. Some young singers were rediscovering Pete Seeger and the Clancy’s. Songs that I thought had been sung to death and decently buried by us folkies back in the sixties were being resurrected.

I learned that there was a lot of folk material on You Tube, so I began to poke around. I have several friends with whom I share this music, and we email each other the better performances we turn up.

Around January Tim Schadt, an old friend, sent me a video attachment containing the performance of a young singer whom he had discovered at a community college he was visiting in his role as an education consultant.

Now Tim is a great guy, but a film maker he is not. The clip starts with a distant, out-of-focus blur with reddish hair singing something that sounded vaguely like Robbie Burns’ My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose. Tim is obviously lumbering down the aisle trying to get closer to the stage, and the image keeps bouncing around, even as the sound quality gets better.

Finally, he apparently reaches the foot of the stage, and the singer comes into focus: a truly beautiful girl with auburn hair singing Burns’ incomparable love song in a lovely, clear voice.

"And fare thee weel, my only love, And fare thee weel a while

And I will come again, my love, Tho’ it were ten thousand mile."

As she finishes the song, she spots Tim…

Yeah, I remember…that funny little man, running down the aisle and kneeling with his camera in front of the stage. At first I was sort of annoyed, but then I thought he was kind of cute. So I smiled at him as I finished the song. I had no idea where that smile was going to take me.

She looks down into the camera and smiles, and for the first time I can see her lovely green eyes. I was stunned, gob smacked, as me Da used to say. It wasn’t just the beautiful voice. The auburn hair, the green eyes and the enchanting smile…it was HER! It was her presence that I had felt, if not quite seen, in my dream. Do not ask me how or why, but I knew that I had found her!

I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you in your wildest imagination—and it turns out to have been pretty wild—that I never wanted to be any guy’s silly dream girl?

Dream or no dream, I was fascinated by this girl. I played Tim’s video over and over, jumping to the last seconds at the end where she came into focus. I emailed Tim, asking if he had a name for this glorious creature. He did not and had already moved on to another college. Then I had an idea. Maybe she had videoed the song herself and posted it up on You Tube.

I typed My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose into the search engine and started sorting through the results. And, yes, there she was! And she had posted other folk songs, some Scottish, some English. There was even an Irish one, The Parting Glass, one of my favorites. All of them were exquisitely sung.

In her videos the lass talked a bit about the songs, and, even when she did not really know much about them, she could ramble on in a most delightful way. I had never seen a face so animated, heard a voice so delighted with the sounds of words, even when they did not always make complete sense.

Yup, that’s me. Pretty face, pretty voice—no brains, of course. Never make any sense, just ramble on and look adorable. Guess I should have gotten my damn doctorate before I dared talk about the songs. You could be so fussy about details.

I played her videos over and over again…all that day and the next and the next. Although she occasionally talked about herself, I could not glean much by way of a biography. She was clearly an American. Yet, her nom de tube, HaggisGirl1, as well as the remarkably accurate Scottish accent that crept into some of her songs, suggested some sort of Caledonian connection.

There is, but I adopted that handle mostly to discourage strange men—like you—from having weird romantic fantasies about me. Who’d want to mess with someone called HaggisGirl, I thought?

Actually, I hate haggis. Okay, I never really had it, but just the thought of a sheep’s stomach stuffed with…stuff…. Yuk. You once offered to make me one, and I just gagged at the very thought of it.

Well, HaggisGirl obviously didn’t do her job. There you were, infatuated with my image without knowing the first thing about me, except that stupid name.

God help me, I was infatuated by the sight and sound of this girl. No, not a girl. She was definitely a young woman, but with the girl still in attendance, ready to dance in with some wild, delightful fancy whenever the young woman threatened to get a bit too solemn in her opining.

I will have you know that I always put a lot of…well…some thought into my postings. And, as far as your girl/woman is concerned, which of us were you infatuated with? Both, I’ll bet. Well, the woman is still here. The girl…Yeah, I’m afraid she’s gone.

I realized how silly all this was. What can be said in defense of a sixty-five-year-old phart who allows himself to be flung back into adolescent Goon Time, when he fell in love with every pretty face he saw. In those pre-digital days, I was crazy about every ingénue in every play, every girl in a film, every wispy-voiced lass with long, ironed hair strumming an out-of-tune guitar in a coffee house.

You put me in such good company! Thanks a lot. But I sure pity all those other girls who filled up your fantasies. None of us want to be part of some guy’s weird imagination.

I was a hopeless mess back then. And now, here I was in my dotage about to regress to type, googling and oogling those exquisite images of a digital female known as HaggisGirl. Still, obsessive as it was, it was better than watching porn.

Seamus! I can’t believe you wrote that!

That sounds terrible. What I mean is…if imagination is all you have, it is better to imagine love than lust. No one would believe this, but I never did entertain any wild sexual fantasies about HaggisGirl. After all, no one lusts after the Mona Lisa, and my Fair Songstress of the Tube was in her way as much a work of art as La Gioconda…with a much lovelier smile. I would sometimes turn down the sound on her postings just to watch the ever-changing expressions flow cross her face.

I was probably just trying to remember what came next. I think with my face. I can’t help it.

But you, poor dear, you really had it bad. I had no idea that you were staring at my videos day after day. The quality of some of them was so awful it’s a wonder you didn’t go blind—from one thing or another.

I won’t embarrass myself by saying how many hours I spent during the late winter months playing her videos over and over again. Obviously, winter is not a good time for me. The house that is so full of light in spring and summer is dark and cold in winter. HaggisGirl kept me going through the dark of the year.

Always happy to…like…oblige. But, even now this kind of weirds me out…that I was part of someone else’s life, someone whom I didn’t know and who really didn’t know me.

Jeez, it’s hard enough to keep track of my…physical self, without even thinking that I had a virtual self out there being dragged into other people’s lives. Even now it seems strange and disturbing.

Eventually, I wanted to communicate with her…to tell her how much I enjoyed her singing, how much I enjoyed her. There is a comments section below every video on You Tube, and I could have used that. When I looked at what some of her devoted fans had posted, however, I discovered that most were written in a type of English that was rapidly devolving back to some sort of preliterate form of communication.

You can be such a snob! Not everyone speaks in fancy paragraphs the way you …did. But, yeah, we do have our own lingo, and it’s not all in the dictionary. LOL.

I had no email address for her and, of course, no real name. However, I did have the name of her community college from Tim. I got on the WEB site and poked around in the events section until I found an announcement for the concert that Tim had filmed. There was no list of performers, but there was an email address for the person who had organized the show. I could contact him or her, one of the teachers there, I guess, asking that my letter be forwarded to the young lady who had sung the Burns song.

But, what could I say that would induce someone to pass on my correspondence? I was pretty sure that a panting love letter would not pass security.

A song! That was it. I would send her a song, and I knew immediately which one. Some years ago I was searching for a setting for William Butler Yeats’ poem Song of the Wandering Aengus. There were various tunes that had been cobbled up over the years, but I never cared for any of them. Then one day, going through the melodies of the blind eighteenth-century Irish harper Turlough Carolan, I discovered that Blind Mary, a tune attributed to him, fitted Yeats’ poem like a glove. It would fit HaggisGirl’s voice beautifully, as well.

The poem itself is, if anything, more appropriate than I care to think. Aengus, messing with some Celtic magic, puts a berry on a hook, casts it into a stream and catches a little silver trout, which turns into a glimmering fairy girl with apple blossoms in her hair. She calls his name and runs off, and he spends the rest of his life searching for her.

And so, through no fault of my own, I became, your fairy fish girl. But you…you didn’t follow the script. You actually found me.

I had recorded the song with a local Irish band, and the Aengus track was available from the Web site I still maintained through the college. However, the site also contained my picture, and, since the lyrics cut a wee bit too close to the bone of circumstance, I decided not to send the URL.

Not that I was pretending to be a young man. In fact, in my letter I think I used the phrase some years ago regarding the song. At the same time I was not keen on presenting my extremely senior status up front. So I just attached an MP3 file directly to the letter for HaggisGirl.

You men do not age gracefully, do you?

In my email I simply stated that, as a musician, I enjoyed her performances on You Tube, and I hoped that she might like to try this particular song that I had put together. I signed the letter, Seamus O’Rourke and hoped that the teacher who received my email would pass it along to its intended recipient.

Several weeks went by without a reply or any sort of acknowledgment. I guessed that my bono fides would have been a lot more persuasive had I used my college email address and made it clear that I was an academic of no mean distinction. Instead, I had used my private email address and identified myself only as a devotee making an offering of a song. My email to the community college had probably been zapped as soon as it arrived.

I was debating whether or not I should try again, this time pulling out all of my academic stops, when, to my surprise and utter delight, I received a charming email from the lass herself.

The teacher who had organized the show had received your email. He passed it on to me, saying that the attached song was really good, but that she had no idea who you were.

I listened to the song and fell in love with it. I wasn’t familiar with Yeats’ poetry, but with that lovely melody the whole thing seemed very magical. However, I couldn’t quite figure out some of the chords you had used.

She thanked me for the song and asked if I could help her with the guitar chords? But she suggested that I should wait for a few weeks before replying. She was shutting down her computer, packing up and getting ready to spend the spring semester at a real college. She didn’t say where, but she did sign her letter. I was now one up on poor old Aengus. My fairy girl had a name—Fiona MacKenzie.

Yes, I gave you my name. What kind of Celtic magic were you using to get me to contact you, to sign my name, so that you could reel me in like Aengus’ silvery fish? You once told me about the old belief that giving someone your real name allowed them power over you. You called it dead naming, which sounded totally scary.

But you gave me your name, too. Did I cast a spell over you? Did we reel in each other?

II: The Hungry Eye Sees Far

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By this time the long, dark and particularly obnoxious winter had become like the guest who finally realizes he has over-stayed his welcome, if he ever had one in the first place. The sherry was gone, the wine cellar bare, the juicy roasts replaced by tough, lean joints; even the porridge was growing thin. It was time