Editor’s Note: Today Michael Ledwith’s Irish Fable continues. His story of a young American man falling in love with a beautiful Irish girl was featured in Part l  and Part ll, and today the story continues with they’re meeting in Athens…what might happen next?.

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By Michael Ledwith

October 25, 2024

The second night he slept deeply. Down, down, down into dreams fantastical and real and populated with the living and the dead. A familiar dream of driving alone through Monument Valley at dawn.

The car followed by a long shadow as he went over the crest to the flat desert stretching out as if on a John Ford western movie set.

Then driving under an Interstate highway overpass which didn’t exist in Monument Valley. Noticing a beautiful woman looking down at the car.

Suddenly, he was standing next to her.

As the car whooshed by, remarking that he had always wanted to live in Paris.

She smiled.

They both looked up at a jet’s contrail high in the light blue desert sky. A flash of sunlight reflected from what might have been a window on the plane.

A small brilliant star during the day.

And he was sitting on the plane noticing a tiny car far, far, below on the two-lane highway. The front window reflecting the dawn as the car seemed motionless on the valley floor 30,000 feet below.

Something hit his shoulder. Not hard. But, then hard.

He turned toward the blow weighing his options depending on who had punched him.

So, it’s been two nights, Yank. Pints of porter enough to wring the truth out of both of us. Brekkie with the old lady down the road. Miles of walking to the beach to check the surf.

‘Let’s check the surf’ the Yank says to me at all times of the day, and off we go. We wade in and the surf is checked.

Do you realize that Irish people don’t go in the ocean? That we don’t know how to swim? That we’re not interested in learning how? That Irish fishing boats go down with all hands every time they sink?

What is it you say again with your Yank accent and words, me feet and legs turning blue?

Five feet and choppy? It’ll get good when the tide drops?

Get good?

What! Good? You mean, warmer? Less wet?

Overhead, you cry!

I look up only to see clouds and a seagull or two.

No, Kate, ya cry above the booming of the waves, OVERHEAD!

Holding your hand yards above your head, explaining that you meant the waves.

The waves being so tall that if you were surfing one, it would be like a roof above your head, and you in a tunnel.

And, what was the Yankee word, let me think… the one with, it turns out, a silent ‘G’?

He couldn’t help but laugh. And, reach for her.

Not that now, she cried, slapping his hand away, this is a serious conversation.

The ‘G’ as if God hadn’t put it there to be pronounce, geh-naaar-leee.

Gnarly, he cried, you mean gnarly? They’ve definitely gnarly darling.

They could hear the boom of big waves, gnarly waves, breaking through the open window.

She hit him again, not as hard, and continued.

Beyond the porter and the food, the late night whiskeys in front of the peat fires and the chats about the ‘surf’ and explaining what a wetsuit does, there’s been some serious dillydallying in my great aunt’s bed under her linen sheets and quilts made with the neighbors.

Cries and whispers like that Swedish guy’s movie. Moans and yells like in a hurly match. You sighing ‘impetuous’ ‘Homeric’ afterwards laying on your back smiling at me enough to make me knees weak.

I promised you a tour. I wanted you to experience Ireland while you’re here, and I’m naked in bed with a naked man who isn’t my fiancé.

She paused. Looked at him.

So, Yank, two nights in a cottage by the sea, are we lovers yet?

I mean like in the books and movies?

A minute went by, then Kate explained:

Engaged I am, technically not a virgin, boyfriends, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a lover.

Certainly not an American one.

He hadn’t had a lover either.

Certainly not one like John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man.

Or, Rick and the all the gin joints in all the world woman in Casablanca.

He couldn’t think of the actresses’ name because he was distracted as the white sheet slipped off Kate’s shoulder and the morning light turned just right.

He wondered, not having had a lover didn’t mean you didn’t know when you were in love the first time, did it?

He thought he was in love. Maybe.

He thought she was the beautiful woman on the overpass. Maybe the sudden bright lights were his heart letting go.

They packed up and drove to a town in the hills for lunch to contemplate the conversation and what happens next.

She engaged to his good friend. He supposed to be hitchhiking around Europe using his Army pay and arriving back in the States to go to law school in the fall.

She having to get back home and return the car.

Kate pulled off the road.

Do you know what that is, she asked, pointing at a green on green field, just off the road that looked more country club fairway than pasture.

Three or four stones, one over ten feet high, tilted at each other in the center.

Rocks stacked in a thigh high fence around it that looked like it’d been there since Ireland had come out of the sea around it.

No sheep. No cows.

He didn’t hear any birds.

We forgot why the stones were there. You don’t find them everywhere, just some places. Accepted like grass and rain and that all Irish people can sing, and porter and scones.

Forgot for two thousand years or more.

We were taught in school that the Druids set them in place.

The forgetting flogged by the priests from the pulpit after St. Patrick arrived.

Did you know he had a pint at Molly Looney’s when he came through?

They were never torn down, just left, like this one. A magic field.

Why magic?

Well, no one crosses the fence and goes into the field, yet the grass is always green and perfect and mown. My cousin, as a lark, jumped this fence when he was ten because he’s a boy and that’s what boys do. Said that when he landed on the other side of the stone fence, the blue sky disappeared.

He was standing in fog and mist and he heard men chanting. He looked back at where we’re parked now and saw a column of priests walking with one leading a white bull. Long cloaks and hoods. Fifty of them if there was one.

The hoods pulled up so you couldn’t see their faces.

Chanting in some strange tongue. When the Druid with the bull noticed him, he raised his staff and shouted, his eyes visible and blazing in anger and my cousin felt like he was turning into ice or maybe stone. Maybe, he told me that’s how the stones came to be. Irish boys breaking rules.

His uncle reached into the field grabbed him by the neck and pulled him out.

Saved from the Druids. Saved from being turned into an ice rock.

Back to a sunny day in June and white clouds.

His uncle’s hand frostbitten. Fingers black, one fell off, and he couldn’t hold a pint for a month.

The American, once an altar boy, inadvertently crossed himself.

Ha, Yank, she cried, a few ‘overhead stones’ in a field and an Irish lass’s story and you’ve returned to the faith have you?

I need a drink, he said.

Let’s go to lunch she replied and kissed him passionately in spite of what the Druids might say.

Seated at the pub sipping whiskeys, she cried, I’ve got to get back and you’ve got to get going.

What were your plans before I spirited you away?

To visit Brendan and his family in Bweeng, and see a bit of Ireland.

Mission accomplished, she cried, a private tour with a chauffeur!

Then she blushed red.

He said, well, no Blarney Stone or the Ring of Kerry have I seen, but some delightful soft hills, glens, clefts, bottomlands. She blushed, shushed him murmuring now, now.

And, draining his whisky while signaling for a pint, two magic fields.

One I was invited to explore and play by the owner, the other, under penalty of death damnation and unforgivable mortal sin, was told to stay out of.

She drained her whiskey, also signaling for a pint and cried, Impetuous! Homeric! Overhead!

Paused a second and then…Gnarly!

Ha, she leaned in close to his ear: I’ve got to invent some euphemisms to use with the priest when I go to confession Friday.

Why?

I’ve got to confess my sins of the flesh during the tour, in a manner befitting my girlhood, lack of sexual sophistication,, and that the priest knows Brendan, knows I’m engaged, and knows my sexual history from coming of age.

He baptized me. Gave me my first Communion, Confirmed me, and will marry me.

When Brendan first French kissed me, I came up with ‘lingual osculation’ as a euphemism and both the priest and I were satisfied and proud.

‘Heavy petting’ was used by all us girls to generalize everything that occurred from head to toe…and, in between!

Ten Our Fathers, five Hail Mary’s, a sincere Act of Contrition three times a day, and a Station of the Cross and we were clear for Communion.

Loss of virginity, kind of, a dream I had about a lonely saint accepted by Father Pat with a wink the next Sunday and used since..

But, Yank, some of the things we’ve done, well.

That Napoleon Zig Zag you made me laugh and do, how to I confess that?

What am I confessing? It had to be a mortal sin, and not a dream, and you a surfer not a saint.

He tried to help: tell him you were comforting a Yank, just back from Vietnam. Him waking up screaming in the middle of the night about the buddies he left lying face down in the mud outside Cu Chi.

Then, in her voice: ‘it wasn’t lust, Father, not wanton. A Christian woman’s duty more like it. The pleasure, the pleasure of rescuing an altar boy damaged by the war.’

Ah, that’s good Yank…that’s both good and believable. He might go for it, but, the cowboy thing?

Don’t mention it other than to say you attempted to comfort him in a manner you thought would remind him of home.

But, you’re from Florida, not Texas!

Lot of cattle farming around Ocala, Florida.

Several pints later and he was tracing his planned general itinerary on a world map.

From Ireland to London via the Swansea boat train.

Grand, she cried! I can drop you at the ferry in Cork on my way home!

Fly from London to Amsterdam.

A drug addict, I knew it, she cried!

Hitchhiking from Amsterdam to Pamplona.

Pamplona, Spain, to run with the bulls like Hemingway, she asked?

I’ve got to be here by the seventh hour of the seventh day of the seventh month…or in four weeks, give or take.

Then Pamplona to Madrid to Barcelona to Monaco, down the Adriatic Coast to Athens.

Homeric! Impetuous! In and out of bed, even wading in the ocean, Kate cried!

Well done, Yank! That’s a plan!

We have to find a room above a pub for your last night in Ireland, and work on euphemisms.

Can we fork again? I mean spoon while we fall asleep?

Spooning, she enunciated clearly, a lovely word from America.

The next day, before the ferry pulled out of the harbor, they had a plan.

Somehow she’d meet him at the bar in the Grand Bretagne Hotel in Athens.

Five o’clock.

September 1st.

-30-

Frequent contributor Michael Ledwith is a former bag boy at Winn-Dixie, who worked on the Apollo Program one summer in college. A former U.S. Army officer, he ran with the bulls in Pamplona and saw Baryshnikov dance ’Giselle’ at the Auditorium Theater.  Surfer. Rock and roll radio in Chicago. Shareholder, Christopher’s American Grill, London. Father. Movie lover—favorite dialogue: “I say he never loved the emperor.”