Short Story in Dialect

This writing prompt comes from a book of prompts meant to encourage you to try new aspects of the craft. This particular one was “Write the opening of a short story entirely in dialect” 

In the spirit of practicing voice for my current novel, which incorporates a lot of Irish mythology, I wrote this short piece in a light Irish dialect.

Seanachie

I’m walking along on a boreen. You know, the auld roads. Worn down cow-paths they are so, no more than that. In the backcountry where the people still know how to talk and better still to listen. The rain drips from the hawthorn leaves and I’m wondering if maybe there might be a bit of a farm up ahead. One where folk still know how to welcome a Seanachie. With a drop of the pure and bite of bread. A warm seat by a fire. 

People don’t have much here. Not anymore, though once this was a place of poets and kings. Now they’re lucky to keep body and soul together and this side of the Hereafter. 

Brack and neeps. 

Poteen from the barn. 

Not so much. But not so little either. 

A boy comes running down the road, muck to his knees from cutting turfs. 

“Where are you running, a buachaill!” says I. And he stops, a good lad who knows the words. 

“Are you the Seanachie?” His eyes are bright as a magpie’s, with the little one’s hunger for story and song. 

“I am so,” I say, tipping my hat, for the flair of it. It’s as broken down and worn as I am. More hole than hat, and my boots the same. But my blackthorn stick is as polished as any shilelagh. Make CuChulainn proud, it would so.

“My Da said you might come. He said they’d been after seeing you in Wexford.” The boy bounces from foot to foot.

I smile, then remember myself. It wouldn’t be fitting to seem too proud. “Been there a time. Until they almost caught me at it. Thought I’d best go along the road to a place where decent folk keep to the auld ways.”

“You’ll come to my croft? Mam and Da would keep you.” 

The boy straightens, a look in his face like a rabbit. Wary for the predators. But proud in that. The fierce pride of one who might survive. 

“They don’t come this way much,” says he. “And we know how to hide when they do.”

“Hush a buachaill.” 

It’s risky to speak that way, even this far in the country. It’s different now than it was when I was a wean, and the only sight of red on a boreen such as this would be the wee cap of a redpoll flying from branch to branch.

Not so now.

He wilts and I nod. “God himself would know you for a Fenian,” I say, to take the sting from my reprimand.

“Aye, well.” The boy straightens and for a flash I can see the shape of a man about his face. The weariness of it. “Meself, and my Da and Uncle as well.” 

The ache of the road is in my feet. Step after step from the green hill of Tara to the broad Liffey Plain. The Great Cliffs and the islands. Sure, it will never be enough. I’ll talk until my throat runs dry for the noise and for a time they’ll remember.

A bit of hope is a fine thing. But too much can kill a man faster than drink.

And memory is the same. It’s why I walk, to remember the all of it. The Chieftains and the stories. The great halls of music and the ring of iron swords. 

“Only don’t tell me Mam,” the boy says. 

And that great age is gone and ‘tis only myself, with my auld hat and wormy boots. And this wee lad. 

“I won’t, so,” I promise.

  I follow the boy, the mud sucking in through the holes in my boots beneath a sky gone pewter with rain. You know the way of it, when the day dawns soft, but will be desperate before evening. 

And now I can hope for thatch over my head. Maybe soup, and ale. A bit of a rug by a fire. And I’ll pay for it the way we have for a thousand years, and a thousand more. With the stories. Of CuChulainn and Emer, Fionn and Sabh. Herself will want the stories of the great heroes and sweethearts. Himself maybe those of Lugh of the Long Arm, Nuada of the Silver Hand.

Niall of the Nine Hostages. Connor MacNessa. Warriors and kings. It will be bloody stories, all fine men who died sick to their back teeth with honor.

And maybe Himself will think of those stories, when the bullets fly and the grass is red and green. Maybe he’ll think of them on the gallows with the noose about his neck, a knot behind his ear.

Maybe I will too, one day when I’m not so quick, nor canny. And it’s my own self the Redcoats come marching for. 

And the darkness of the gaol, and the slick hangman’s rope. 

More poetry in hanging, than in being shot. 

Though, if it’s a story they’re after, the drama of both will do.