HP Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror - Weird Tales

62 H . P . L O V E C R A F T ’S M A G A Z IN E O F H O R R O R
He listens, familiarizing himself with their idiosyncrasies, gauging
the players. His old regular session, in Brooklyn, has disbanded.
This could become his new one.
The first set comes to a close. He believes he has their
measure. They seem to believe they have his, too. His keen ear
picks up the comments: "Don't sit there, now, you won't hear
yourself think." "Mind where you're sittingthat fella's a queer
one." "Wouldn't say a word to me at the Gloc, if he weren't a
piper I'd think he was deaf." "He thinks who the hell he is,
that's what he thinks."
He does not acknowledge what he hears by even the slightest
hunching of shoulders. He has not come for the craic, for
the chitchat. In a moment, or two moments, or three, it will be
time for the next tune.
He is ready now.
A wiry man squeezes into the empty chair beside his.
Aidan scooches over, concealing his surprise; you take chairs
where you can find them. The man greets him with the quick
twist of the chin customary on the back roads of rural Ireland.
Aidan trained himself out of that long agohis students thought
he was spasticand just nods in return. They wait, a small silence
within the rising bar noise, for the next tune to start.
Some sessions have a leader, a good player who consistently
comes up with good tunes; some take on a roundrobin style.
Aidan prefers the ones like this, conducted in the manner of a
Quaker meeting: whoever has a tune in mind simply begins
playing it. These sessions, Aidan feels, are the most heartfelt, the
most eerie. In these sessions, the organism has no head; it finds
its way using senses deeper than thought or sight. These sessions,
Aidan feels, are mystical. They are the ones that transport
him to something like that place of love he once knew, that
place of love he can never allow himself to think of ever again.
He snugs his reed in place. He cut the reed himself, as
pipers must; there are few enough uilleann pipers left in the
world, and fewer pipe makers still. A piper is on his own, with
the instrument most difficult to maintain and most difficult to
play of any in traditional Irish music. Old instruments, not
designed for a world of mass production and tech support.
Some pipers, to offset the isolation of their craft, form small
groups within the traditional subculture itself. Aidan has not
joined them.
Someone to his lefta man playing a straight flute, a beautiful
blackwood thing with silvernickel jointshas started a set of
jigs, almost too low to hear at first. "The Wandering Minstrel,"
a signature Seamus Ennis tune. A tune made for pipers.
Aidan gently collects his instrument. His fingers, not arched
but straight, position themselves at the holes on the chanter. He
switches the drone off, does not touch the regulators; their
sound will not be appreciated. He operates the bellows with his
right elbow: the pipes breathe in. He presses his left elbow
against the bag: the pipes breathe out. He begins to play.
He listens more to the tune that surrounds him than to the
tune he produces himself. He joins and accompanies; he
learned long ago not to dominate. Except for the accordion, his
is the loudest instrument here, and since earliest childhood he
has feared its fullest sound. He melds the nasal tone of his pipes
into the center of the music. He plays with all the courtesy and
consideration his personality seems to lack. You can sit next to
him and still hear yourself think. He does not drown out; he
floods from within. He gives the melody roundness and the
chords depth. He expands them the way air expands a bag.
The way the breath of life fills a lung.
"The Wandering Minstrel" leaps from middle notes to low
note like a dancer, spinning in the upper register before landing
back in the middle, only to dip and leap again. Its A part
bespeaks the rise and fall of expectations. The B part is midoctave
surges of emotion followed by wry resignation; the C part,
grasping at high As and Bs, is all the brightness of a life lived in
pursuit of joy, and the poignancy of its inevitable failure,
resolving into a sense of completion, of happiness in the face
of the ephemeral.
As the tune ends, Aidan so fully expects it to go into
"Jackson's Morning Brush" that he segues right into it. They are
statement and response, these two tunes; they are mirror
images of joyful striving; they are fugue and variations, uncomplete
without each other. Other players have anticipated the
pairing also. Aidan's heart swells, like the swell of air in the bag
against his side. The musicians are one.
These are the instants that keep him alive. Like his elbow
on the bellows, they force breath and life into the shell he
inhabits. Aidan does not entirely believe in his own existence.
In class he hears his own history lectures as an unmodulated
drone, the endless undercurrent of his days. But at these times,
as assembled players verge on something like telepathy, he has
faith: he is alive.
After "Jackson's Morning Brush," the flute player, perhaps
jokingly, strikes up "Lark in the Morning." It is a favorite tune
of whistlers, a sweet melody that trills like the bird it's named
for. Peripherally, Aidan is aware of percussion strategically
adding to the repeat. The rumbling heartbeat of the goatskin
drum, applied in the right measure and at the right moment,
quickens the pulsebut it is more than that: the hypnotic syncopation
of another, clicking percussion, to his right. As the
variations mount in the fourpart jig, the spoons add a spindly
insectile sound to the almost subliminal boom of tipper on
drum. It is mesmerizing; and the closer Aidan listens, the better
he plays.
Then the set is over. Aidan subsides into his halfstate, his
halflife, as the wave of chatter surges in to fill the betweentune
gap, the "Will you have another then?"s and the "By the way, I
meant to tell you"s. The pub has grown crowded, noisy; musicians
continue to arrive, and the barman produces extra chairs
as if by magic, wedging them in around the table or adding
them, like the rings of a tree, to the periphery.
"Heard you up at the feis," the man next to Aidan says
without looking at him. Not a regular; someone like him, someone
unmoored. His spoons protrude from a back pocket,
catching on the chair when he turns; a pair of bones flank his
dark pint on the table. He played well, with a manic gleam in
his eye and a wicked grin. "You were very good," he goes on.
Aidan won a lowlevel piping section at the Westchester
event, and played for a children's stepdancing competition. He
thanks the man, but adds nothing, encourages nothing. The
praise unnerves him.