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Sometimes corpses are waked in a bed, with their faces visible; when that is the case, white sheets, crosses, and sometimes flowers, are pinned up about the bed, except in the front; but when they're undher boord, a set of ould women sit smoking, and rocking themselves from side to side, quite sorrowful these are keeners friends or relations; and when every one connected with the dead comes in, they raise the keene, like a song of sorrow, wailing and clapping their hands.
I have made it a point to hunt out these ancient dames at their homes, and, over the teacups, I have discovered that invariably they enjoy a sweet peace a happiness with contentment that is a great gain. They seem to be civilization's rudimentary relic of the Irish keeners and the paid mourners of the Orient.
"'T is the Bogans going to Ameriky, yer reverence," responded Jim Kalehan, the shoemaker, from his low window. "The folks gived them their wake whilst they were here to enjoy it and them was the keeners that was goin' hippety with lame legs and fine joy down the convanient alley for beer, God bless the poor souls!" Mike Bogan and Biddy his wife looked behind them again and again.
Her friends and relatives would come and shriek too. Two of the dead man's aunts were among the best keeners in the whole land. They could keen marvellously. It was raining too hard to go on.... The road would be impossible in rain.... Yes it was very melancholy. Her house was close at hand. Perhaps twenty or thirty women would join her. It was impossible to go on until it had stopped raining.
His sentences followed each other in metrical balance like the Latin of the old liturgies, and suited themselves naturally to a subdued melody, half chant, half cry, like the mourning of the keeners round a grave. At last, rising from his knees, he spoke, and his voice became wholly unemotional, devoid of fervour or excitement.
Immediately he started up, and knew that they were faeries; for slowly all that jolly company melted into shadow and night. He hurried to the house of his beloved. As he drew near came to him the cry of the keeners. She had died some time before he came. Some noteless Gaelic poet had made this into a forgotten ballad, some odd verses of which my white-capped friend remembered and sang for me.
The affliction of the latter and of her daughters was really pitiable; their sobs were loud, and the tears streamed down their cheeks like rain. When the widow's exclamations had ceased, or rather were lost in the loud cry of sorrow which were uttered by the keeners and friends of the deceased they, too, standing somewhat apart from the rest, joined in it bitterly; and the solitary wail of Mrs.
Then, and not before, she may address herself to mundane things. Good "Keeners" are in much request, and a really efficient howler is sure of regular employment. The Connaught folks are somewhat rough-and-ready with their dead. Colonel Winter, of the Buffs, told me that he came across a donkey-cart in charge of two men, who were waiting at a cross-road.
But whatso is predestined to a man, that needs must be, and none knoweth what shall befal him. We lived thus a great while, till Almighty Allah bereft one of my neighbours of his wife. Now he was a gossip of mine; so hearing the cry of the keeners I went in to condole with him on his loss and found him in very ill plight, full of trouble and weary of soul and mind.
The weird music of the wind became Ireland's cry of lament for her dead. The tossing boughs beyond the window, rain-spattered and somber, took on eerily the outline of dark-cloaked women keeners rocking and chanting the music of death. The rain was tears. Ochone! Ochone! The wind of sorrow rose and fell, rose and fell, with unearthly cadence.
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