Free Green Grow the Rashes and Other Stories by William Meikle

 
    Green Grow the Rashes
     
    I first saw him in
February. Despite the fact that winter still held a tight grip in
Newfoundland, the city of St. John’s was alive and kicking. We were
set up in a bar just off George Street, and the place was packed
with drinkers, dancers, drunks and those heading that way fast.
Booze flowed, we played ever-faster, and everyone was having a high
old time.
    And yet…
    I felt strangely
dissociated from the whole thing. Even the old songs failed to stir
me the way they used to. Twenty years of doing the same thing every
day will do that to you, whether it be sitting at a desk, driving a
bus… or singing in a bar. It was taking more and more booze to oil
my gears every night. If Johnny and Dave had noticed, they had kept
quiet about it. But that night in St. John’s proved to be a turning
point.
    It started
well enough as I made it through Flowers of the Forest and John
Barleycorn, but less than an
hour into the gig the whisky I’d been knocking down kicked in.
Johnny started the fiddle intro to Green Grow the Rashes ,
Dave came in right on cue on the squeeze-box… and I fumbled the
ball, being a full beat late on the first guitar chord. I was an
old hand at winging it, so the general audience scarcely noticed,
but I saw the look that passed between the two others with me on
the small stage.
    I had enough
pride left in me to feel embarrassed. I turned away from their
stares… and that’s when I saw him. I say him, but it was some time
afterwards before I was able to discern a gender. That first night
it was just a darker shadow in a corner, but one that seemed to
draw my eye, one that gained depth and presence as
I sang the old song.
    There's
nought but care on every hand,
    In every hour
that passes.
    I’d sang the
same song a thousand, two thousand, times, but that night was the
first in a long time that I felt it, and
understood. Emotion poured through and out of me and I gave myself
to it wholeheartedly. The song rose high and pure. I became aware
that Johnny and Dave had stopped playing
    The worldly
race may riches chase,
    And riches
still may fly them, O,
    And tho' at
last they catch them fast,
    Their hearts
can ne'er enjoy them, O.
    I had tears streaming
down my face by now. The audience stood, mouths gaping, all eyes,
most of them wet like mine, staring at me. I put one final push
into it and brought the song to an end.
    The applause nearly
lifted the roof off the old bar. The darker shadow in the corner
shifted. I peered, trying to see who was there, then Dave clapped
me on the arm, handed me a beer, and the spell was
broken.
     
    ~-o0O0o-~
     
    It was a busy
tour, and we were booked every night. We played most all of the
settlements on the Irish loop, pushed the old van too hard over the
long schlep to Gros Morne and back, and had three riotous nights in
Clarenville. There was no recurrence of the magic I had
felt that night in St. John’s. Indeed, the black dog had
settled in me again, and I’m afraid I took to the drink rather more
heavily than I should have.
    It was the rear end of
March before we got back to St. John’s and I didn’t know whether to
be happy or worried that we were to return to the same venue. I was
even less pleased when Johnny and Dave had a word with me at the
bar before we went on.
    "Could you try to hold
off on the hard stuff for the first hour, maybe two?" Johnny said.
He laughed, but I saw it in his eyes… he was deadly serious. And so
was Dave.
    "Just don’t screw up," he
said. Any other time I might have argued the toss, but I knew in my
heart that they were right… I just didn’t know whether I wanted to
do anything about it.
    But I tried, I
really did. I got to the midway point in the set with only a couple
of beers to tide me over. But an exuberant fan wanted to buy me a
whisky at the interval. He made it a double, and another, and I was
half cut by the time we started again. I’d got through Flowers of the Forest and we were half way in