Fairy Story

Well now, I’ll be telling you a story tonight, instead of singing a song or reciting a poem, but, in a sense, it’s not a story at all, because it’s not made up, but is totally true, as my father told it to me, except that, while you know well who I am talking about, I have, of course, changed the names for the publication, because, while every word of it is the truth, there are some people who can’t stand the truth, and some people who might want to make a dispute about it, if the true names were named.

And so, I will call the family concerned the Murphies, because that’s a very common name, now, and it could be anybody, and it’s about how the Murphies had the misfortune of crossing the fairies.

Now, there are some people who say they have seen the fairies, but, in my own experience, nobody ever actually sees the fairies. It is more like we sense the fairies.

It’s like, if you are by yourself at night, and it the night of the new moon, and no light at all in it, and you are on the road, now, passing by the fairy fort at Liss Mulgee, for example, and you think you see a glow coming from the fort, well that’s not that you see a glow at all, but you have this sense of energy coming from it, and the nearest way you have of describing it is as a glow. And since some people will share with you and say that, yes, they too have seen – or, in truth, sensed – this glow, and others won’t, it is a fact that some have this, as they say, sixth sense, and others don’t have it at all, or don’t have as developed a sense of it.

And, when you hear the fairies, it is not as if you hear them at all, but you have this sense of energy coming into your head, like as if it is rays of energy, but neither light nor sound, and you feel the energy in your head, and your head, I would say, transforms it so that it can understand it, in a sense, so that you either hear it as screeching voices, angry screeching voices, or, sometimes, I suppose, as soothing musical voices, or else your brain sees it as figures of light, so that you see them inside your head, and then you think you have seen them with your eyes. Well, that’s the way I think we see them, from my own experience, but another person’s experience might be quite different, of course.

But one thing for sure, you know the Murphy’s house. You know the house I am talking about, although their real names are different. That house, that was a house, down by Cloonaliss, yes, that’s the house I am talking about.

The Murphies used to live there. Of course I have never seen the Murphies there in my time, because all of this happened in my father’s time, and since that time the Murphy house has been unoccupied. The house and the grand, flat field in front of it – all that was the Murphy’s, as well as bits and pieces here and there –well, after the Murphies all passed away – tragically – the land and the house went to the Reillys.

And the first thing the Reillys did - that was Micky Reilly the elder, now - the first thing the Reillys did was, they tore down the extra room that was the cause of the dispute with the fairies, and there never was a bit of trouble with the fairies since then: they will leave us alone, if we live them alone, and that’s the truth of the matter.

Yes, Mary, a glass of whiskey, if you please, with just a drop of water.

Well what do you think of that house? The Murphy’s house! Isn’t it as nice a house, as pretty a house as you ever saw? With a lovely fine meadow in front of it! It’s the meadow that gave name to the townland, “Cloonaliss,” the Meadow of the Forts. And wouldn’t it be a lovely place for a house and to raise a family, but it has been nothing but a cow house for more than fifty years!

Paddy Murphy, let’s call him that, for I don’t want to be disclosing his true identity now, was the young man of the house who brought a young wife, Mary, into the house. And while the house was good enough to rear the last three generations of Murphies, what did Mary want, with her notions of grandeur, I suppose, but to enlarge the house, because it wasn’t big enough for her?

Well, Paddy would say, “Sure the old couple won’t be here forever, and then we’ll have one room for ourselves and another room for the children, and what more would we be wanting?”

But Mary would answer: “O Paddy, dear, I wouldn’t want to be wishing your parents dead. We need a room for ourselves, a room for the old couple, and a room for the childer, and we need to have it now, so that we can enjoy life while we are still young.”

Well, the young couple’s son was growing bigger, and the way it was, I would say now, Mary wasn’t going to give Paddy any more children until he gave in to her and built the extra room. So, Paddy gave in and set about building the extra room, and, where do you think he built it, yes, out at the back of the house, and that’s where the trouble started.

There is a fairy path at the back of that house. Now the fairies don’t mind people going on that track, so long as they don’t obstruct it. And it is an important fairy path, for it is continuation of the path of the five Lisses that leads from the five Lisses of the western county down to the river, and for whatever reason – and it is their own business not ours – the fairies are always traipsing up and down from the Lisses to the river.

And nobody was closer to the fairies, in more senses than one, than the Murphies. Generations of Murphies, indeed, had seen and heard the fairies, and Shawn Murphy, who went to America and was famous for playing the fiddle, one of the tunes he recorded, that has only been re-released a year or two ago, didn’t he say that he got it from the fairies, and of that I have no doubt. And others of the Murphies were known in years past to have talked with the fairies.

But, didn’t Paddy Murphy start extending the house out over the fairy path, without any thought of the fairies at all, and without consulting the fairies, and that’s when their trouble started, I tell you.

The old people used to say that the fairies gave them plenty warning when they started building that room. Mortar wouldn’t stick; a chisel would slide off the timber and stab the carpenter; timber would split down the middle to a nail, and other things that I don’t remember or didn’t take in.

Howsoever, the room got built, and, by all accounts, a fine big room it was. But it was hardly finished when the old couple went and died, one after the other. The old woman complained for a while before she died that she used to hear noises in her head, and what was that but the fairies?

The young couple was never happy in that room. They never had a good night’s sleep in it, but were wakened every night by imagined noises and lights flashing in their heads. And what could that be, but the fairies?

And, where they were loving and happy parents before, once the room was built they were cranky and bossy. And the same could be said of the son. In those days, children left school when they were big enough to work on the land, and that was the age the son was at by the time the room was finished. He wasn’t right in the head, either, since the room was built, though he was a normal, happy child before that.

From the time the room was built there was nothing but bickering and arguing in that unhappy house. And that was because the fairies put noises in their heads.

Then the first tragedy struck. One day, when the son didn’t come in for his supper, the mother went out and found him hanged, dead, in the barn.

The mother was inconsolable. The doctor gave her tablets to take, but they did her no good. A week or two after the son’s death, she drowned herself in a bucket of water! Yes, a bucket of water.

And, what did Paddy do? They found him dead sitting on a chair with a shot-gun, which he had propped between his knees and blown his head off.

It is how the fairies got inside their heads, with their screeching and disturbances. They took the entire family, first the old couple, then the teenage son and then the young couple, one by one. And they would have taken down the house too, stone by stone, if the Reillys, who took over the land, hadn’t knocked down the extension and freed the fairy path.

That’s the way.

Well now, if you don’t mind, there is a verse that I’d like to sing, or a chorus, maybe it is. The old people used to sing seven verses to this song, but I only ever caught the chorus. It’s a pity the radio wasn’t there in the old days, or they could have come out and recorded the song when the old people had it: but here’s the chorus for you anyway, and the musicians know the tune!

The King of the Fairies,

He sits upon his throne.
His clothes are made of silk,

But his heart is made of stone.
He cares not for the humankind,

But he protects his own,
And he’ll take the life of any man

Intrudes upon his zone.