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When we got to the Harp & Tankard that afternoon, we were met out back where we parked our van by a Native American fellow.Miki introduced him to me as Tommy. I thought he was with the bar—after all, he helped us bring in our gear and set up, then settled behind the soundboard while we did our soundcheck—but he turned out to be a friend of hers and in on her secret plan. After we got the sound right, he lit a pair of smudgesticks, then he and Miki waved them around the stage until the area reeked. They weren’t sweetgrass or sage, but made of the herbs and twigs that Miki had told me about back at the Hole: rosemary and rue, blackthorn and hemlock.

The smell lingered long after they were done—which was the whole point, I suppose—and didn’t make it particularly pleasant to be up there in it. I wasn’t the only one to feel that way. I noticed as the audience started to take their seats that people would come up to the front tables, then retreat to ones farther back after a few moments. It was only when the back of the room was full that the closer tables filled up.

The audience was part yuppies, part the local holdover hippies, with a few of the longtime residents of the area standing in the back by the bar. You could tell them by their plaid flannel shirts and baseball caps. There were also a number of older Native women scattered throughout the room, and I wondered why they didn’t sit together. I could tell that they knew each other—or at least they all knew Tommy, since before he got back to the soundboard, he made a point of stopping and chatting with each of them.

“Do you know the song ‘Tam Lin’?”Miki asked.

Tommy was back on the board now, and we were getting ready to start the first set.

“Sure. It’s in A minor, right?”

“Not the tune—the ballad.”

I shook my head. “I know it to hear it, but I’ve never actually sat down and learned it.”

“Still you know the story.”

“Yeah.Why—”

“Keep it in mind for later,” she told me.

Her mysteriousness was beginning to get on my nerves. No, that wasn’t entirely fair.What had me on edge was the knowledge that tonight was the night the butter spirit meant to make me his tithe to Old Boneless.

“Don’t forget now,” she said.

“I won’t.”

Though what “Tam Lin” had to do with anything, I had no idea. I tried to remember the story as I checked my foot pedals and finished tuning my guitar. It involved a love triangle between the knight Tam Lin, the Queen of the Faeries and a mortal woman named Janet, or sometimes Jennet. Janet loved Tam Lin, and he loved her, but the Faerie Queen stole him away and took him back with her to Faerieland. To win him back, Janet had to pull him down from his horse during a faerie rade on Halloween, then hold on to him while the Faerie Queen turned him into all sorts of different kinds of animals.

It was hard, but Janet proved true, and the Queen had to go back to Faerieland empty-handed.

Fair enough. But what did any of that have to do with my butter spirit and him planning to make me his tithe to Old Boneless?

Apparently, Miki wasn’t going to tell me because she just called out the key of the first number and off she went, blasting out a tune on her accordion. In a moment, the pub was full of bobbing heads and tapping feet, and I was too busy keeping up with Miki to be worrying about the relevance of old traditional ballads.

Miki was in a mood that night. The tunes were all fast and furious, one after the other, with no time to catch a breath in between. Most of the time, when we got to the end of one of our regular sets, she’d simply call out a key signature and jump directly into the next set.

I didn’t really think of it as peculiar to this particular night. Once she got onstage, you never knew where Miki would let the muse take her. Having a long-standing fondness for jazz tenor sax solos, as well as a newfound love for Mexican conjunto music that she’d picked up on our tours through Texas and the Southwest, she could as easily slide from whatever Irish tune we might be playing into a Ben Webster solo, or some norteño piece she’d picked