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“What?” she said.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seems that for a woman born in Ireland, who makes her living playing Celtic music, you don’t care much for your own traditions.”

“What traditions? I like a good Guinness and play the dance tunes on my box—those are traditions I can appreciate. I can even enjoy a good game of football, if I’m in the mood, which isn’t bloody often.What I don’t like is when people get into all that mystical shite.” She laughed, but without a lot of humor. “And I don’t know which is worse, the wanna-be Celts or those who think they were born to pass on the great Secret Traditions.”

“Which is a good portion of your audience—especially on the concert circuit.”

She had a sip of her draught and smiled at me over the brim of her glass. “Well, you know what they say. Doesn’t matter what your line of work, there’ll always be punters.”

That was so Miki, I soon discovered. She was either irrepressibly cheerful and ready to joke about anything, or darkly cynical about the world at large, and the Irish in particular. But she hadn’t always been that way.

I didn’t know her well before she hired me; but we’d been at a lot of the same sessions and ran with the same crowd, so I already had more than a passing acquaintance with the inimitable Ms. Greer before we started touring together.

Time was she was the definition of good-natured, so much so that a conversation with her could give some people a toothache. It was her brother Donal who was the morose one. But something happened to Donal—I never quite got all the details. I just know he died hard. Overseas, I think. In the Middle East or someplace like that. Some desert, anyway. Whatever had happened, Miki took it badly, and she hadn’t been the same since. She was either up or she was down and even her good humor could often have a dark undercurrent to it. Not so much mean, as bitter.

None of which explained her dislike of things Irish, particularly the more mystical side of the Celtic tradition. I could understand her distancing herself from her roots—I might, too, if I’d been brought up the way she had by a drunken father, eventually living on the streets with Donal, the two of them barely in their teens. But while my background’s Irish, I grew up in the Green, what they used to call the Irish section of Tyson before it got taken over, first by the bohemians, then more recently by the new waves of immigrants from countries whose names I can barely pronounce.

The families living in the Green were dirt-poor—some of us still didn’t have hot water and electricity in the fifties—but we looked after each other. There was a sense of community in the Green that Miki never got to experience. I’m not saying everyone was an angel. Our fathers worked long hours and drank hard. There were fights in and outside of the bars every night. But if you lost your job, your neighbors would step in and see you through. No one had to go on relief. And my dad, at least, never took out his hardships on his family the way Miki’s did.

There was magic in the Green, too. It lay waiting for you in the stories told around the kitchen stoves, in the songs sung in the parlors. I grew up on great heaps of Miki’s “Celtic Twilight shite,” except it was less airy, more down-to-earth. Stories of leprechauns and banshees and strange black dogs that followed a man home.

And, at least according to my dad, not all of it was just stories.

“Well?”Miki said.

“Well, what?”

“Do you need a bang on the ear to get you going?”

“It’s a long story,” I said.

She looked at her watch. “Then you better get started, because we’re back on in twenty minutes.”

I sighed. But as I restrung my guitar, I told her about it.

2

I remember my dad took me aside the day I was leaving home. We stood on the stoop outside our tenement building, hands in our pockets, looking down the street to the traffic going by at the far end of the block, across the way to where the Cassidy girls were playing hopscotch, anywhere but at each other.

“If it was just a need for work, Conn,” he finally said, trying