The Balladeer's Apprentice​​
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The Balladeer heard the world through song. He heard chord progressions in the icy waves that crashed along the Ballyshane shoreline. He heard lyrics in the chirping birds that skittered from the rain-soaked pastures of Kilbrittain for sunnier real estate far from home. He heard rhythm in the turning carriage wheels and the horse hoof clicks on the dusty country roads. Perhaps that’s why he never fussed much over being alone, because no matter how lonely he may have seemed, the music of the world was close by to keep him company.
When he was a younger man, he traveled the rural landscape of southern Ireland with little more than a topcoat and a guitar. There wasn’t a pub in County Cork where the innkeeper didn’t know his name. The townsfolk knew of the Balladeer, too. They came to his performances for the bittersweet ballads and stayed because they were drawn to his handsome features. He had wild copper hair, a neatly trimmed beard, and eyes that possessed the romantic quality of a philosopher’s stare. Though the Balladeer would be the first to say that it’s not only the look of a man that tells his story.
There was poetry in his fingerpicking, and such a spirit in his lyricality, that when one heard him perform, it was impossible to walk away without feeling forever changed. When he took to song, even the veterans of the Great War, hardened by nightmares of the trenches, couldn’t help but open the locked doors of their hearts and well up with ancient tears they’d try to hide behind their rough hands. When he was on stage with a guitar on his knee, his attention appeared to be elsewhere, on a rain-soaked windowpane or on a melancholy widow sitting alone and nursing a sherry. It was this balance of intimacy and distance that charmed so many of the country girls who came to hear him play. They locked in on his every note, only shifting their focus from the man to whisper giggled adorations to the other girls at their table.
During one such performance, the Balladeer couldn’t take his own eyes off a country girl who was sitting with her friends in a booth off in the back. As he finished, “Follow Me up to Carlow,” he found himself staring at the woman while she sipped her drink. Hoping to refocus, he quickly started into another ballad. But then she brushed her dark hair from her face and their eyes met. His hands went clammy. His pulse quickened. With that thump thumping, he felt his heart would explode right through his chest. Flustered, he lost the tune of the performance. He stopped his guitar and let his eyes wander over the audience. “I’m sorry, folks,” he apologized. “Lost my place, I guess.”
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Deidre blushed. She enjoyed watching the boy struggle. She further enjoyed that she was the source of his struggle. She straightened out her auburn work dress and approached the stage. “Could you play The Fields of Athenry?” she asked him.
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Her voice was a fresh melody, a song the Balladeer had never heard before. He lost his words. And though he tried to settle himself, he couldn’t take his eyes off the heavy crimson of her soft lips.
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“Are you in there, lad?” she asked with a smile that possessed a knowledge of his unspoken affection.
“I’m sorry, miss,” he was finally able to say with a little crack in his voice.
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She returned to her friends. He played the song. Once it was over, she offered the Balladeer a polite nod in appreciation. After his set was over, Deidre sat beside him at the bar and offered him a pint. The pair sat in conversation for a while in the romantic glimmer of the firelight until the barman began closing up for the night.
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“May I walk you home?” the Balladeer asked while helping the barman collect dirty glasses.
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“You may.”
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They walked along Church Square, arm in arm, under a thumbnail moon. Finding a bench beside the park, they sat close together, and each confessed they were orphans. They each confessed they were eager to begin their real lives. They each confessed they were dreamers.
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“I hope to see America,” she whispered. “Like my younger sister, the actress.”
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“I hope to have a family,” he whispered. “I never got to have one of those.”
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They spoke their dreams in whispers, fearful that too loud a voice would prevent them from coming true. For hours in the crisp darkness of an Irish autumn, they spoke of their futures behind the tune of night crickets until the sun rose over Charles Fort.
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***
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A marriage and a baby they called Jack, soon followed. They found a small cottage not far from town with strong stone walls, a sizable hearth, and a couple of simple rooms. It wasn’t much, but the place had its own melody. The way the strong winds rattled the shutters, the way the floorboards creaked and croaked with each heavy step, the way the crackle of the fire popped and whined.
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It was a humble existence, no doubt, but the Balladeer never asked for more than his worth. The only luxury he allowed himself was a small library of second-hand poetry that would kickstart his heart when the writing got tough. And anyway, all he really needed, he said, was a warm fire and a song. He played for Deidre and Jack in the mornings by that warm fire when the fresh sun spilled in through the small window to the east. With a hot coffee beside him, he tinkered with new ballads while Deidre hummed along and the baby offered little coos of approval.
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Just as they all began settling into the pleasures of domestic life, Deidre’s sister in America fell ill. With her parents gone, the obligation to care for her sister was just too strong to ignore. The Balladeer hurried to pull together all their humble savings for passage across the Atlantic. Two tickets were all he could manage. The decision was made that Deidre and Jack would go first. The Balladeer would gig through the cold winter, save what he could, and meet them by spring.
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At the shipyards, Deidre was bundled in her heavy red pea coat with a green tweed scarf wrapped around her neck. As she cradled baby Jack in her arms, she whispered her goodbyes to the Balladeer.
“Don’t cry, love. I’ll be seeing you before you know it,” she said, trying to comfort him while nestling herself into his open arms. He squeezed her tightly, unable to find his voice. She stepped back and looked him over. Her eyes went wide with a sudden fear that he might run off on her like so many of the other husbands in town who lost themselves to drink and untethered women once the children arrived.
The Balladeer sensed her trouble. He blew warm breath into the cupped palms of his fingerless gloves. “No need to worry. We’ll be back together again before you know it,” he whispered. He gave them each a kiss that eased Deidre’s nerves and said, “Safe journey, my dear ones.”
But back in those days, there was no such thing as a safe journey. Fare thee well, too often meant forever.
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The storm came on fast. The ship took on water. And all were lost.
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When he heard the news, the music of the Balladeer’s world was suddenly silenced.
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He barely left the cottage after that. When he did venture out, he never spoke to anyone and kept his eyes firmly affixed on the ground, fearful that the sight of a sympathetic eye would cause him to break down in the street. His waking mind was full of nightmares, dense with grotesque illusions of how Deidre and Jack violently left this world. So he boarded up the window to the east, desperate to put those visions to rest and feed his gluttony for sleep. In his dreams, he willed himself to seek out an untarnished memory of Deidre and Jack. After months, she came to him in such a dream and chastised him for his childish mourning.
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“Enough of this moping,” she scolded. “It’s time to get on with your life now. See, I’ll be wanting you to sing for us when we meet again. You mustn’t get rusty.”
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The Balladeer heeded Deidre’s commandment and set back into the world. Wandering the landscape of his grief, he made his way from gig to gig like a man lost in a fog. People couldn’t help but see that the man had changed. His hair had grown long and gray. His clear blue eyes, once as riotous as the Irish Sea, had turned dark and cold.
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One night, he was playing at his favorite pub called The Queen Jane. It was intimate and dark: all stone and wood. The Balladeer loved it so because the barback kept the fires burning and the lights down dim. When he was on stage with the gentle firelight before him, the place almost felt like the home where he’d play for Deidre and Jack. Following his set, he was at the bar looking after his third pint when a young boy, no older than 20, approached him with a fresh ale and a smile.
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“You were great up there,” the boy said.
“Thanks much, lad,” the Balladeer replied.
“I was wondering if you’d train me,” the boy said hesitantly, “if you do that kind of thing.”
“I’m sorry, no. I don’t,” the Balladeer said.
“I can pay you, sir,” the boy said with a desperate quiver in his voice. He pushed the ale toward the Balladeer.
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Sipping his beer, the Balladeer quietly looked the boy over. His dark hair was floppy, and he had acne pocks on the stubble of his chin. His posture was slouched, and his trousers were too large for his lean frame. In all, the boy appeared fragile, as if he might break at any moment.
“Tell me, boy,” the Balladeer said. “What do you know of loss?”
The boy, Patrick was his name, went on to tell the Balladeer his own tragic story. “My father was executed in the War. After my poor mother heard the news, she walked around like she was lost in the daylight, staring at the walls for hours without a word. She passed shortly after. The doctor said it was a broken heart,” Patty said. “Never quite understood that. Dying of a broken heart. When you lose someone you love that much, it’s more than your heart that breaks, ain’t it?”
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The Balladeer knew it was. Underneath the boy’s plain language, he could hear a shiver of grief. He could hear a song. He was then struck by a sudden responsibility to help the boy give voice to his hurt. “Tuesdays and Thursdays at my cottage outside of town,” he instructed, running a hand through his wild, gray hair. “We play before the sun sets.” The Balladeer said no more, returning to his fourth pint in the hopes that drink might silence the agony of his despair.
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The boy arrived at the cottage prepared to play the role of the steadfast student. He tapped his knuckles timidly on the door. The Balladeer invited the boy in. He sat in his armchair, the one by the fireplace where Deidre nursed baby Jack. Patty sat beside him on a small stool that wobbled when he shifted his weight with the excitement of learning something new. The Balladeer picked up his guitar, the one with the wood worn at the neck. Patty closely observed his teacher while he demonstrated a chord.
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“You see?” the Balladeer asked.
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Patty didn’t see. He struggled with all of it. His finger positions were off, his chord progressions were clunky, and like the town’s taxman, he couldn’t arrive at the figurative logic of a well-placed metaphor. In short, the boy labored mightily with the language of music, but to his credit, he was quite the student. He arrived at their sessions early and did as he was told. He listened intently to his teacher and took notes with a shaved-down pencil nub in order not to forget what they’d covered. After leaving the cottage, he’d continue his studies, drafting ballads late into the night, when all the gas lamps along Sligo Street still flickered with the romance of midnight’s quiet temper.
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After two years of persistent study, Patty was able to find small gigs around the village. A church fundraiser here. A pub or two there. He never packed them in like the Balladeer, but given the boy’s reputation as a bit of a lost cause, his competence made his teacher seem all the more impressive. So much so that another young man came calling, seeking out the Balladeer after a performance at the Wexford Inn.
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“Daniel O’Sullivan, they call me.”
“How can I help you, Danny?” the Balladeer asked softly.
“I want to learn. Like Patty.”
“I’m done with all that, I’m afraid,” the Balladeer said, sipping his tea. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy his work with Patty. He did. Though he found that the more he taught the boys, the less he performed, and he reasoned that he was a balladeer, not a teacher. The man couldn’t help but feel that the farther away he got from the stage, the more he became a stranger in his own skin.
“Please, sir,” Danny begged.
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The Balladeer saw that Danny had a face the girls in town would find easy to love. He had neatly trimmed amber hair and long sideburns that would’ve paired nicely with a beard if he could’ve grown one, which he couldn’t. He owned broad farming shoulders and wore clothing wrought for wear. The boy’s strength was impossible to ignore, though there was an uncertainty in his eyes, like he wasn’t sure whether he belonged in his own story.
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The Balladeer gave a polite nod and asked, “Tell me, what do you know of loss?”
Danny sighed. “My girl, Shannon. She left me right for another fella.” He cleared his throat and wiped a tear with the back of his hand. “I just wish I could see her one last time, is all. Hear her voice. Smell her perfume. So I can remember it all, you know?”
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The Balladeer did know. Even though it had been years since he lost his family, he still slept under sheets of sorrow. In his dreams, he slipped into phantom memories of Sunday suppers that never were. In his dreams, he played songs for the ghosts of his wife and child over tea and biscuits by the fire. In his dreams, his family would bundle up in the winter and trudge down Butcher’s Row for an evening out at the cinema.
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It was this shared sense of lost love that swayed the Balladeer to take Danny on, though he promised himself the boy would be his final student. Thankfully, it all came easier for Danny. The Balladeer didn’t need to spend an hour in demonstration with him as he did with poor Patty, and he quickly came to look forward to their time together.
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Following a year of study, Danny had become a fine musician with the pen of a poet.
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“You’re ready, Danny,” the Balladeer said to him after a lesson as Danny was packing up his guitar.
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“You think?”
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“I do.”
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Audiences came in droves to admire his fit frame, to witness his strong hands delicately pluck at his guitar strings, and to listen to his original ballads. Performance after performance, word of Danny’s skill spread. Within a few months, all that acclaim brought another hopeful young man to the Balladeer’s door.
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It was early morning when Finnegan arrived at the Balladeer’s cottage with a brand-new guitar in a velvet-lined leather case. He was dolled up in a gray three-piece suit and standing in shiny new shoes that were slightly muddied from his trek out of town. His hair was black as soot, tightly parted, and wet with oil. The boy banged crassly on the cottage door with a closed fist. When the Balladeer opened up, he was still in his robe and bed slippers. He wearily wiped the sleep from his eyes and asked, “And you are?”
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“I’m called Finnegan. I’m here for my lesson,” the young man commanded, rubbing a thumb over his clean-shaven chin.
The Balladeer looked the boy over with his fancy suit, his fancy shoes, and his expensive new guitar. He’d seen dozens of boys like him over the years. They’d bound into the pubs on the posh side of town with their chests puffed out and their muscles half-flexed. Such a well-to-do boy would know nothing of loss, only of gain, and thus he felt no need to take the young man on.
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“I’m done with all that, I’m afraid,” the Balladeer explained politely.
The boy flashed a wry grin, stuck a thumb in his jacket pocket, and launched into a sob story about his folks going down on the Titanic, about his true love falling asleep on a church pew during mass and never waking, about his dog Clover running off into the dark of the Ballyregan night never to return. Sob story after sob story, he spoke with such conviction that he was almost able to mask the rancid odor of his bullshit.
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“I don’t believe you, Finnegan,” the Balladeer said sternly. “I don’t believe a word of it.”
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“Well, it’s all true,” Finnegan said, doubling down on his lies as young men are wont to do.
“No, it isn’t. Here’s the first rule of Balladeers. Your job is to make them believe. Not only in their minds, but in here,” the Balladeer explained, touching Finnegan’s chest.
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“Yeah, yeah. Look’it, I need a teacher old-timer, and you’re the best.”
The Balladeer looked the boy over again. He was pompous; there was no doubt about that, and blessed with that easy confidence which so often accompanies the monied.
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It would’ve been easy to dismiss the boy because of his privilege. And in truth, the Balladeer spent a hard moment considering such a dismissal. But then, he wondered, why shouldn’t such a boy get an education? Why should a man’s wealth prohibit such a thing? He held his stare on the boy’s smirk of superiority. He is a foolish child, the Balladeer reasoned, without a lesson, he’ll never learn.
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So the Balladeer took him on. It wasn’t easy, but teaching never is. The self-importance of young Finnegan irked him to no end, but he did well to hide his disdain from the boy. After their first few lessons together, he became so sick with shame for further boosting Finnegan’s ego that he doubled his confessional visits with Father Attaway. He even wrote a ballad about their time together called The Serpent’s Last Song.
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As much as it pained the Balladeer to admit it, there was no doubt that Finnegan had the gift. He never told him this, of course, but the speed and precision of his finger-picking was like watching a sleight-of-hand magician, and his turn of phrase in songwriting rivaled the Balladeer’s.
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For his part, Finnegan liked to keep the lessons short and had a knack for stealing the Balladeer’s best bars to repurpose them for his own tunes. At the end of each session, he’d slip in subtle slights meant to harm the old man and inflate his own worth. Things like, “Maybe next time a challenge, Pops.”
Their last lesson came shortly before the chill of December turned the greens of the plains gray with season. The Balladeer sat quietly while Finnegan played him The Auld Triangle. The Balladeer had heard the song a thousand times before, maybe more, but not like this. He nearly lost his breath. He placed his wrinkled hand over his heart. Finnegan looked up from his guitar. When he noticed his teacher’s awe, he stopped playing mid-chorus, flashed a cocky grin, and packed away his pricey guitar. Then he left the cottage, walking out into the cold, without a word of consolation for the grief he may have caused his teacher or a word of thanks for the time he’d gifted.
Word of Finnegan’s talents made its way through the countryside. Soon, the pubs were too small to hold his devoted numbers. Even the churches couldn’t contain his fans who’d flock into town when news of Finnegan’s arrival was posted. The Balladeer heard that the boy had given up the lavish suits, ditched his fancy shoes, and began performing with a four-string guitar that he had sanded over and stained to give it the impression of an instrument that belonged to one who’d suffered. He heard rumors that the boy played with ripped trousers, a stained white blouse, and a corduroy coat with a tweed flap cap. Despite all the games and deceptions, the Balladeer harbored no ill will toward the boy because he knew that if Finnegan lived long enough, he’d learn.
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As the years passed, the Balladeer unboarded that small window to the east to allow for the morning sun to return. The torment of Deidre and Jack’s absence was still there, but it had become more of a smolder than the destructive bonfire it once was. The man had grown so weary with age that when he picked up his guitar and tried to play, his arthritic hands locked up on him. He played less and less and stopped performing. He missed the stage, but oddly enough, what he missed most of all was his lessons with Patty, Danny, and even the arrogant Finnegan.
One day, as the frosts of winter thawed and the spring wildflowers began to bloom in the meadow beside the Balladeer’s cottage, he was roused by a soft rapping on the door. The old man opened up and laid his tired eyes on Finnegan. The man looked a shell of his former self, deflated, with his limp arms dangling by his side. He had changed.
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“Come on in,” the Balladeer said, wrapping his robe around his gaunt waist.
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Finnegan slumped into the room, slouched down onto his student stool, and laid his guitar gently on the floor by his feet. The Balladeer placed a few dry logs in the hearth and lit the fire. He sat in his chair beside Finnegan and waited. He waited for the snarky boasts. He waited for the riotous exaggerations of his own accomplishments. He waited for the privileged put-downs. But they never came. Instead, Finnegan unsnapped his guitar case and removed the instrument. While he was tuning the thing, he struggled to meet the Balladeer’s eye.
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Finnegan cleared his throat and played a new ballad for his teacher. The Balladeer paid it a respectful listen, trying to ignore the memories of all the hurtful words directed his way. The song seemed to be about the great famine, but the Balladeer could see through the framing metaphor. He could tell it was about lost love. It was perhaps the saddest thing the Balladeer had ever heard. When the hum of the stringed vibration came to rest, he allowed the song to settle inside him for a beat. Finally, he placed a hand on Finnegan’s shoulder and asked, “Was it your parents?”
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Finnegan was unable to give voice to his grief. The Balladeer, feeling the familiar pull of that nostalgic anguish, didn’t push the issue. He only went on to say, “Well, it’s a beautiful song, Finnegan.”
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Something about hearing the Balladeer say his name set Finnegan off. He lost what little strength he still possessed, hunched over, and wept into his hands while struggling to tell the story through his muffled tears. “My wife. My child. Smallpox,” was the breadth of what the Balladeer could make of it.
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There was nothing the Balladeer could say to heal such a fresh wound; he’d learned that one has to live with it. Eventually, the anguish would feel like another limb; it would just be there. Picking up own his guitar from beside the hearth, he asked, “How about we play one together, son?”
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The Balladeer’s apprentice uncurled himself, wiped away his tears, and held tight to his guitar. “I’d like that,” he said. “Thank you,” he said. Then he leaned over to help tune his teacher’s guitar and rested his own on his knee. Together, they strummed up a melody. They hummed along a wordless chorus. They sat for hours by that fire, tweaking the rhyme and tinkering with the chords. They’d hit a wall, fail, regroup, and then fail again. By the time the morning sun whispered through the cottage window, the two men had finished the song. They called it The Balladeer’s Apprentice. Both men would admit toward the end of their own stories that the song was their finest, though neither of them ever played it for another soul.
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​​By Jeremy Stelzner
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Jeremy Stelzner’s stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines, journals, and anthologies, including the 2024 Coolest American Stories, the McNeese Review, and Prime Number Magazine, where his story The Thin Line was awarded runner-up for the 2024 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. He’s a teacher of literature and journalism.
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Website: www.jastelzner.com
Email: jeremystelzner71@gmail.com