Green Grow the Rashes and Other Stories

GREEN GROW THE
RASHES

And Other
Stories

By

William Meikle

Copyright 2015 William
Meikle

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1. Green Grow The
   Rashes
   

2. Out of the Black
   

3. The Sweller in the Dress
   Hold
   

4. The Just One
   

5. In the Spring
   

6. The Dark Island
   

7. Too Many
   

8. Authors Note
   

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 to
John Barleycorn
before
I realised that we hadn’t changed our set order.
The song…
that’s how I thought of it… was up next. I’d been
singing it at all our gigs with no problems at all, but now that we
were back in this bar it started to get to me… so much so that I
forgot a verse of
Barleycorn
. That got
me another of
those
looks from Dave when the song came to
an early end.

"We can skip
straight to
The Haughs of
Cromdale
if you want?" Johnny
said.

I might even
have agreed, had not my gaze been caught by a gathering shadow in
the corner. This time I could almost make him out… a stocky figure,
with bushy hair and a straggly beard, almost as dark as the shadows
in which he stood. Somehow just looking at him brought the
magic
back. I didn’t want a drink, didn’t want to be anywhere
else but right there, on that stage. And there was only one thing I
wanted to sing.

I surprised both Johnny
and Dave by starting right in without accompaniment. The audience
fell quiet after just two bars. All that could be heard was my
voice, soaring, dancing and filling the room with both joy and
sadness at the same time. The shadow in the corner deepened and
took firmer shape.

There's
nought but care on every hand,

In every hour
that passes.

I
felt
those cares, as if I’d borne them all my life. Tears came
again. I let them come, and put everything I had into the
song.

And tho' at
last they catch them fast,

Their hearts
can ne'er enjoy them, O.

As I brought it to an end
the place was deathly quiet. All I could hear was my own breathing.
Then the crowd erupted in applause that seemed to go on forever.
Dave and Johnny both wore huge grins. But they soon faded when I
stepped down off the stage.

"What
about
The Haughs of
Cromdale?
" Johnny shouted. I
ignored him and headed for the shadowed corner. I had to force my
way through a crowd who all wanted to pat me on the back, buy me a
drink, give me a kiss, anything to get close to the bearer
of
the song.
Over their heads I caught a glimpse
of a shifting shadow, a sense of something
green
moving
deeper into the darkness. When I reached the corner I found only
empty space. I turned on my heels and headed for the bar, ignoring
the shouts and exhortations coming from Johnny and Dave.

By the time they had
finished the set and came to berate me, I was far too drunk to
care.

~-o0O0o-~

In the morning I woke to
find them gone. I couldn’t even remember where our next stop was to
be. There was a bird involved in the place name, that I knew, but
whether it was Gander, or Happy Valley Goose Bay, I had no idea.
Not that it mattered, for I had no intention of following them. All
I wanted was to find the man who had stood in that dark corner;
find him, and learn how to bring up the emotion that was too deeply
buried to find at any other time.

I spent the
rest of the day in the bar, supping beer and casting looks into the
corner. Several patrons tried to engage me in conversation, mostly
about
the
song
, but a couple of grunts
soon put paid to that, and eventually I was left alone with my beer
and my memories. All too soon I was back on the hard stuff
again.

And so it went, through a
long afternoon that turned into a fuzzy evening.

I had been good, once
upon a time, a lifetime ago. I left Scotland in my twenties with
the voice of an angel and the confidence to send it out to any
audience who would listen. I played gigs all over North America, to
ever-bigger crowds, ever bigger acclaim. I met Jennie, and we did
all of that, but together.

Then she went and died on
me. My voice shrank, and so did the crowds, and my life got
smaller, circling Newfoundland in a decrepit van, singing the same
songs every night, and drinking, always drinking. I had thought I
was as dead as my love. The man in the shadow had shown me
different. And I hated him for it.

I only shook myself out
of my reverie when the night’s entertainment started up -- a band
of youngsters, musically gifted, but with about as much heart as a
lump of wood. I left them to it and headed for the washroom. To do
so I had to pass by the shadowed corner.

He was there again, a
darker blackness but recognisable as the same stout man from the
night before.

"Hey!" I called out, and
headed in his direction. But as I closed on him, so he seemed to
slide away from me. I followed the shifting shadow, around the wall
of the bar and out, into a biting cold night.

~-o0O0o-~

It had been snowing
again, only a light fall, but enough for me to see his footsteps,
leading away. They were strangely short and wide, and left what
looked like flecks of rotting vegetation in the prints, but I
didn’t have time to stop and look, for although he was stout he was
also fast, heading off at speed to the south away from the town
center.

I followed as quickly as
I was able. The booze was taking its toll on me, and I could scarce
manage more than a stumbling waddle. The shadowy figure was soon
lost out of sight. I stumbled on for a while, following his
footprints in the snow, but soon even they became confused with the
prints of others that had passed this way. I slumped, exhausted
against a wall.

~-o0O0o-~

Then I heard it, a high
clear tenor singing
the
song
.

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 followed the
sound, and entered
a cemetery, an old one
by the feel of it, with overgrown rose bushes and ivy encrusted
walls. The song stopped as soon as I stepped into the grounds.
There was a figure, a bent, hunched over, man in the left-hand
corner. I called out to him.

"Hello?"

There was no reply. I heard a noise,
crackling and a rustling, but there was no sign that I had been
heard. I moved closer, noticing that the figure was the one I had
been following. He was stocky, with a mass of bushy hair and even
bushier beard. In the light under the trees he looked almost
green.