A quiet man from Seattle plays his cards close to the chest

DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:IT'S HARD TO believe that there was life before psychotherapy; a time when people didn't share their feelings with anyone, a time when people grew old with heavy weights on their chests, knowing the burden of things not said. West Cavan was full of such heroes years ago. You'd see them lined up at the bar in dark smoke-filled pubs, nursing pints like bowls of soup.

I remember the pot-bellied stove at which the old fellows would warm themselves on winter nights as the wind came in under the door. The floor was bare cement, and on fair days or nights when snow covered the galvanised roof, everyone wore wellingtons. People were civil – no one talked politics, and what was hidden in the heart withered in the heart.

Nowadays young people tell each other everything. At least I think they do, judging by the level of chatter that goes on at an average party.

I was at a birthday party during the week, in a barn behind a farmhouse. The girls’ father barbecued burgers and jumbo sausages all night, and her boyfriend’s family drove down from Derry, and her sisters made bunting, and people she worked with brought gifts, and for the first half of the night everyone huddled around in the windswept barn, under steel girders and a galvanized roof, eating as much meat as they could to keep warm, and shuffling their feet and talking their hearts out. The fact that we were all freezing didn’t bother anyone.

Then a young Italian man who is an expert at fishing for pike, and knows how to make fires on the shoreline, even on a rainy day, got a barrel with no bottom, and stood the cylinder in the middle of the floor using a cement block to fix it at a tilt.

Then he lit logs in the barrel, making a fierce blaze, and the iron reddened, and the wind blew the smoke away, and everyone warmed up and danced. And when the dancing was over, people sat down and sang songs until the clear light of dawn. And finally everyone lay down on the floors of the big farmhouse, wherever they could get a spot to rest, and snored until halfway through the following day.

I went home early because I had to go to Galway the next morning.

The sun shone all afternoon, and on the lawns in Eyre Square young people were holding hands, and kissing.

An old man was clinging to the wall outside the Great Southern Hotel, so I escorted him across the street.

He was looking for the statue of Pádraic Ó Conaire, and he was disappointed when he realised it had been taken away. He was very short of breath. He wanted me to escort him to a taxi. I asked him was he on holidays.

He said: “No.”

“Where do you live?” I asked.

“Seattle,” he said.

I said: “That’s where the famous sean-nós singer used to live.”

“That’s correct,” he said.

He may have loved or hated the famous singer, but he wasn’t giving anything away.

I tried to remember the singer’s name.

“I think he was called Heaney,” I said. “Joe Heaney.”

“Ó hÉanaí,” he said. “Seosamh Ó hÉanaí! And when that fellow was a child he used to go out in the currach, on the darkest mornings before he set out for school. And pulling those oars, and hauling up those lobster pots, left more welts on his nine-year old hands than the schoolmaster’s stick.

“But do you know what I’m going to tell you? Those same hands now lie in the clay of a graveyard near Carna, and will never again pull anything from the sea. When you get old, you die, and then people forget your name.”

I asked him did he ever meet the singer.

He said: “We must be careful of the traffic here. They would run an old man down nowadays in Galway.”

I said: “You’re like the Quiet Man in the film; you play the cards close to the chest.”

He got into the back of the taxi without further comment, and gripped the back of the driver’s seat. He looked at me with cold blue eyes, through the car window, like someone who had a lot of secrets and intended bringing them all with him, to the grave.