There are ten verses. Everybody knows there are ten verses.
You go bog, tree, branch, twig, nest, egg, bird, feather, flea, and that's your lot. The flea is the CLIMAX, as I have said roughly four hundred times on this shrine, and after the flea you stop and you have a pint and you feel like you've climbed a mountain. Ten. That's the song. You can count them on the page over on the lyrics yourself if you don't believe me.
Mick Hennessy does not believe me.
Mick is convinced — and I mean CONVINCED, not the casual kind of convinced where a fella will back down after his second pint, but the deep load-bearing kind — that there is an eleventh verse. His grandmother sang it. He heard it as a small boy in the kitchen in some townland outside Tulla that I've never been able to get the exact name of, and he has been trying to drag it back up out of the bottom of his memory for as long as I have known him.
I have known Mick a long time.
We had the argument again on Thursday. We were sat in Cruise's, fiddle case under the table, two pints between us, and he started in on it the way he always does, which is sideways. He doesn't announce it. He just goes quiet, and then he taps the table twice, and then he says, "There was more, you know." And I say, "There wasn't, Mick." And off we go. Round forty, or thereabouts. I've genuinely lost count.
Here's the thing about Mick's eleventh verse. He can't sing it. That's the whole problem. He can FEEL the shape of it — he says it sat after the flea, that it was the last one, that it was about something underneath, something below the flea, lower down, and that his grandmother used to drop her voice for it like she was telling you a secret. But the words won't come. He gets two, maybe three syllables and then it slides away from him like a wet bar of soap. Twenty years he's been at it. (I am not exaggerating. Ask anyone in Cruise's. They'll roll their eyes, but they'll tell you the same.)
Now. I love Mick. Some of you read the letter he sent me and you know the cut of the man. He's nearly seventy and he kept this song breathing in empty rooms for years when nobody else cared, and if Mick Hennessy wants to believe his granny had a secret eleventh verse, then God love him, who am I to take that off him. A man should be allowed one beautiful mad thing he can't prove.
And mostly that's what it is. A lovely Mick thing. The way some fellas have a fish they nearly caught.
I'd have left it there. I WOULD have. Only.
Only there's the other bit, and I've been chewing on whether to even write it down, and I suppose I will, because that's what this shrine is for.
A couple of summers back there was a fella through Cruise's I'd never seen before. Quiet sort. Sat in the corner, nursing the one drink the whole night, didn't say much. And near the end, when the session had gone soft and most of the crowd had drifted, he sang a verse to himself. Not for the room. Just under his breath, to himself, the way you'd hum something you couldn't shake. Mick was up at the bar. I was the only one near enough to catch it.
I didn't think anything of it at the time. Honestly I'd half forgotten it.
But when Mick was going on Thursday — "lower down, Seamus, it was about something LOWER down" — a few of the stranger's words came back up in me, unbidden, the way a smell brings back a room. And the shape of them half-matched. Not all of them. Not even most of them. But the rhythm of the thing, and one word in the middle of it, the word he'd dropped his voice for — that matched. That matched the way Mick says his grandmother dropped hers.
I never asked the fella his name. He was gone by closing and I never saw him again.
So I said nothing to Mick about it. What would I say? "Mick, a stranger I can't find sang a verse I can't remember and one word of it lined up with a song your granny sang in a kitchen sixty years ago"? He'd have me committed. Or worse, he'd believe me, and then he'd never sleep again, and the eleventh verse would stop being his lovely mad thing and start being a thing that's actually out there, somewhere, that he nearly had.
I'll tell you what I think it is. Coincidence. The brain is a great matcher of patterns, and an old folk song has a rhythm your ear already knows, so of course a stranger's half-remembered verse will rhyme up against an old man's half-remembered one. That's all. People want the world to join up. It mostly doesn't.
But I bought Mick the next pint and I didn't argue as hard as I usually do. He noticed. "You're quiet," he said. "Am not," I said.
We'll have the argument again. Round forty-one is coming, sure as the flea follows the feather. And that's grand. The argument is the tradition now, as much as the song is. A cumulative song that keeps adding verses is the right kind of song to have a missing one — there's always supposed to be one more thing on the bog, isn't there. One more thing down in the green grass. Maybe Mick's just singing the form back at itself.
Anyway. Ten verses. Everybody knows there are ten verses.
If you ever meet a quiet fella in a corner of a Clare pub humming something low to himself, do me a favour and write down the words. For Mick.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin' sat on the windowsill the entire time I was writing this and stared at the bog field across the road and would not be moved. I'm sure it's the birds. It's always the birds. There were no birds.