HIGHLY COMMENDED
in the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2025!
Listen to Seamus reading his story:
Anyone who knew JJ McHale growing up said he was singing before he could talk. That’s probably an exaggeration, but who was he to contradict his elders? He was definitely very young when he first began to take the floor at Meitheals and Seisiúns to entertain his neighbours. He had no memory of the songs he had sung back then, but his parents’ friends loved them and adored him, especially the women: women as big as heifers, women as delicate as wrens, women from eighteen to eighty. They would wrap their arms around him like a big blanket and snuggle him into their chests, crowing giddily.
‘Ooh, come here, a graween.’
‘Couldn’t ya just eat him up?’
‘He’s like a cup of fresh cream.’
‘Wouldn’t you slip him under your shawl and take him home with you?’
The warmth and softness of their bosoms as they squeezed his face tightly into the tender, fleshy masses, made him feel safe and cherished for those moments. The memory was warm, whiskey coloured. Life doesn’t stay like that though.
He remembers very well the day his mother died. He would like to recall that it was a frosty day in February or a dreary, rain-sodden late afternoon in November, after a day picking cold, wet potatoes out of the hard, broken earth. He knew it wasn’t. It was a day in mid-May, the month of Mary, the blessed virgin, whatever that means. It was a gorgeous, gorgeous day and he sped home from school, hoping that his mother might be well enough for him to help her out of her bed for an hour, so she could maybe take him back the boreen to pick wildflowers for the May altar in school. But he was met instead by his father, dressed in his best, black, Sunday going-to-Mass suit, his face fixed in an angry glare. It was like he had lassoed a dark cloud and was carrying it around on his shoulder, like Jesus carrying the cross to Calvary.
‘Get cleaned up. The priest is coming.’
When JJ got inside and called to his mother, she didn’t answer. Probably asleep. She often was when he got home. She’d been sick abed for a while. So, he climbed the stairs quietly and tip-toed into her darkened room. The floral curtains were shut, the window too. The air was stale, sickly, a vomity, sweaty sort of smell that the single lighted candle couldn’t mask.
‘Did you not see the candle? You fuckin’ loodremawn!’ His father had shouted later.
Why the hell hadn’t it dawned on JJ what was after happening, with the closed curtains, the smell and the stupid fucking candle? His father was right; he was a fucking eejit. Thinking she was just asleep, he had edged forward and planted a delicate kiss, like a petal on her cheek, his lips barely brushing it. He felt the iciness and sensed the hardness of the stretched skin. Her face was as still as the far lake in summer. Was there even breath coming out of her? It was already becoming difficult for him to imagine that set mouth ever again smiling or laughing or singing along with him in the chorus of a favourite song, their very breaths in perfect harmony.
‘She’s gone from us, son. Now get cleaned up.’
But how could she be gone? His mother would never leave him. Surely she must have been taken. Some diabhal, a pooka or some fairy maybe, something unnatural or supernatural, like in the stories she used to tell him, must have slipped in unnoticed after he left for that damn school this morning. It must have stolen her, right from under his fuckinggobshite-of-a-father’s nose. God damn and blast it! Why hadn’t he stayed home from school altogether? If he’d been here with her, he’d never have let anyone, man nor beast, ghost or goblin take his beautiful mother from him. He’d have minded her. He glared angrily at his growling father.
‘Go on I said!’
JJ was eight years and one month old.
It rained the day of her funeral.
‘The angels are crying for your mammy, JJ.’
He sang ‘Amhrán Mháinse’ at the mass. He could sing it, feel the music of it, but he didn’t understand a word, back then. As he sang in the cold, darkened church, the auld wans bawled their eyes out. He didn’t sing for a whole year after that. When he did, it was different from before. The listeners still loved it, were even more gushing in their praise, the women even more generous with their hugs and cuddles. But when he had sung in the past, he had been aware of only notes, melody and words. He had simply hopped, skipped and skimmed from crotchet to quaver, like a harvesting bee, or a fresh breeze playing with autumn leaves. But now when he sang, he felt like he was being swallowed by the song and was floating around inside it, being tossed and turned by the melody, chilled and warmed by the sounds of words he often didn’t even know the meaning of but could feel the full weight of. It was like he was the flower now; he was the leaf being played by the breeze.
The first time he did sing after that was in the house of the prettiest of his neighbours’ wives, Fionnuala. At least to his young eyes she was. Her hair was long, soft and wavy, like golden clouds shrouding her plump face. Her bosom always seemed too big for her frock and her smile made him feel like the sunshine used to. It was Fionnuala’s birthday, and she begged him to sing her favourite song. She held his face in her soft-as-a-buttercup hands, planted a motherly kiss on his forehead, promised him an extra slice of apple tart then hugged him close, his cheek squeezed against the exposed flesh of her breast. He agreed to break his musical silence, not for the slice of apple tart but in return for the delicious thrill her hug had sent shuddering through his young body. The skin of his cheek was still tingling when he reclaimed it from her embrace.
‘If I was a blackbird, I’d whistle and sing…’
If he had known that day that he would spend the next eight years in a sullen glowering contest with his father, he would have run away right there and then. But he didn’t, because you don’t think like that when you’re still only a child. No. When you’re a child you search only for the next possibility; you ferret out the positive; you treat your life like a great, endless adventure. And that’s what JJ tried to do, but his father was having none of it. If he had taken off his black suit in itself after the funeral was over, there might have been some hope for him. Instead, he chose to keep it, or the shadow of it, always about him. JJ never again saw the man smile. His touch that had been manly and strong, became rough and ungenerous. His language spiteful. His words sharp. His emotions tight. And JJ seemed to get the worst of all of them. He was the youngest, ‘the baby,’ as his father constantly reminded him in a snide, cutting drawl.
It wasn’t like JJ didn’t try his best to fit his father’s mould. He’d helped out with the milking, in the bog, at the hay in the summer, kept the house clean and tidy, though he would never do that as well as his mother had. But he was only a boy, and a boy whose head was full of dreams and imaginings, quicker to spot an opportunity for adventure in the woods or down by the river than to spot a cow stuck in a drain or a job that needed doing. Between his father and his two older brothers, there was hardly anywhere on his body that wasn’t black and blue from digs and belts and horseplay. In a house of grieving men, he became a punch bag. By the time he was big enough to hit back, he had lost interest in them and their pettiness.
‘Sure, if he was even any good at school in itself?’ His father would often sneer.
School had always been a prison for JJ too. He could never understand why supposedly intelligent adults believed that locking children in a schoolroom for hours on end was good for them. What of use would they ever learn caged in like that? They’d have been much better off being released into that great, big, wonderful world outside the window that was just sitting there, waiting to be explored, discovered, tasted and relished. He could never take in much of the weighty knowledge the teacher was imparting in suitably sonorous tones, yet he would have a song or a story after only hearing it a couple of times. He spent most of his time staring out the classroom window dreaming of escape and wondering would his life ever be happy and carefree again.
There was one young teacher who did make an impression on JJ. He was a trainee or substitute or something, so was only with them for a short time but he had a great love of plays. Not the literature of them, not the technical why and wherefore of the themes, the rhymes or the structure, but the blood and guts of them. He talked about the characters as if they were real. What drove them on? What stood in their way? What was their fatal flaw?
‘We all have a fatal flaw children,’ he would say. ‘Not one that will necessarily kill us, but one that could hold us back and prevent us reaching our full potential. These plays are lessons for life,’ he would declare. ‘Life is a series of obstacles that we must overcome and learn from so we can grow and flourish!’
When JJ was finally released from school for good, it was the best day of his life since he had lost his mother. He was fifteen years and two months old. His father got him a job in the village grocery shop, thinking it might suit him, since he seemed to be allergic to hard work. JJ loved it. Why the hell couldn’t the gobshite have done this long ago? Was it trying to torture him he’d been? But that was all spilt milk under the bridge by then, so no point looking back. This was what was happening right then and there, and it was good. No. It was very good. It got him away from that den of bitter men. He had money in his pocket, what his father didn’t take from him, and as it was mostly women did the shopping, he was in his element.
Between keeping a smile on their faces in the shop by day and a twinkle in their eyes at the night-time singsongs, life had really started to look up for young JJ McHale. And when the women hugged him then, there was more than a tingle running through his pubescent body. Oh yes. JJ McHale had started to smile again. To dream again. Search for the possibilities. Sense that true independence and liberation lay out there somewhere, beyond the narrow confines of his constricted world, just waiting to be grabbed. Although his ultimate flight to freedom, on the squeaky bicycle of a cuckolded farmer, was still two years and four months off, JJ McHale had finally grown into his voice, had found his feet and his steady march towards his destiny had well and truly begun.
Seamus Moran is an actor, director and writer for stage and screen. He has written three plays, Have A Heart, Squinty, Dolly and Mick. Seamus wrote and directed three short films and a half-hour drama for TG4 entitled Síle. He began writing short stories at the start of this year and was longlisted for several prestigious competitions. ‘Finding Voice’ is the first of his stories to be published.