The Glittering World

The Ceilidh

        Before they started down the hill, it was already clear that their hostess’s idea of a little shindig was in fact a full-blown rager, the sound of live music an eerie thrum off the water long past the dusking of foggy Starling Cove. “Holy shit,” Elisa said over the skirl of a fiddle as she zagged across the gravel drive, camera in hand and tottering behind the others on stilettos she’d stubbornly insisted on wearing. “They don’t mess around here, do they?”

      “I could tell Maureen partied,” Gabe said. “Something about her screams high spirits."

        A dozen revelers had spilled out onto the lawn, where an auxiliary troupe of musicians tuned their instruments as they waited their turn. A few dozen more were packed inside Maureen’s crowded living room, along with a band consisting of a fiddler and an accordionist flanked by two guitarists, as well as a drummer rocking out on a djembe. The candlelit room was loud with laughter and drink. Young children ran loose, and as they flitted about in a game of tag, Blue had a ragged flash of memory: a moonfaced little girl chasing after him as a fiddle played, the celebratory yet somehow menacing stomp of feet and clapping of hands all around... He closed his eyes and strained to hold tight to the thread, but the recollection was gone.

     Maureen parted the crowd with a drink held high in her hand. “Glad you all could make it! What’s your poison?”

      “What do you have?” Gabe asked.

      “Not a whole lot. Only some beer, and some wine. And some lethal sangria my cousin made. I’d be wary of that. Oh, and some fine old whisky a friend brought. A jug of it. There’s some fustier options as well, like schnapps. And possibly sherry somewhere...”

     Within an hour Blue was merrily drunk, having met what he imagined to be every resident of Starling Cove. Maureen herself was a potter who sold ceramics out of a nearby shop she shared with an abstract sculptor, while her friends included a woodworker specializing in driftwood art that featured in local galleries, as well as a glassblower who lived and peddled his pieces out of a converted century-old barn on the far side of the cove. Starling Cove seemed an ideal spot for artisans to sell their wares, situated as it was on a stray branch of the heavily touristed Cabot Trail. Blue wondered how many of them were castoffs from the former artists’ colony, and how many might have known his grandmother, or his mother, or even him. No one mentioned the old commune outright, only that the cove was known for its diversity, a place people gravitated toward from both near and far.

     A diminutive and heavily bearded man named Fred Cronin, an ironsmith and publisher of a local newsletter, waited alongside Blue for the bathroom. Though standoffish at first, he soon warmed under the heat lamp of Blue’s attention, and spoke of how he had moved to Cape Breton from Detroit as a draft dodger in the early seventies, never to set foot in America again. By all appearances, this self-imposed exile was fine by him.

      “This your first ceilidh?” Fred said in a career smoker’s rasp, stroking his silver-flecked beard as he leaned against the stone mantelpiece in the living room.

      “My first what?” Blue was distracted by the objects scattered across the mantel: a framed watercolor of a white lotus-leafed hexagonal mandala, a pewter tray containing a half-burned bundle of sage, an exquisitely rendered praying mantis crafted from green Bakelite that stared back at him through compound eyes, dark brown bordering on black.

      “Ceilidh,” Fred repeated. “It’s like a Gaelic hootenanny. Could be a barn dance, or even just a house party like this. Basically, a get-together to get drunk and dance around to some old- country-type Scottish music. Lots of old country culture here, even today. They don’t call this place Nova Scotia for nothing.”