Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

Miki had never understood the concept of stage fright. The only thing she liked better than playing her button accordion for its own sake was playing it in front of an audience. The larger the crowd, the better. It wasn’t that she had a big ego, though she certainly had more than enough confidence in her instrumental ability and knew she could keep an audience entertained. Nor did she need the additional validation of applause. That wasn’t the point of her love for playing music live. It was more that she didn’t consider the music to be real until it had made the circuit from player to listener’s ear and back again by way of the listener’s reaction—a circle that could push the music up another notch every time it came around, building through a performance until sometimes when she came offstage, she’d be almost staggering, drunk on the music.

It didn’t have to be a big audience—only one that gave the music a fair listen, and was willing to express how they felt about it.

So far as Miki was concerned, they had a grand audience at the Crowsea Community Center tonight. A dancing, foot-stomping, hand-clapping appreciative audience that was making the band work twice as hard since they’d started the set, just to keep the energy up. In short, the evening was unwinding exactly the way she liked it. She sat on a chair at one end of the line of four musicians that made up Jigabout, accordion bouncing on her knee, and was barely able to keep her seat she was having such fun, dancing on the spot, seated and all. Of course it helped to have musicians of this caliber to be playing with.

Jigabout was a pickup band, put together for tonight’s gig when the New-ford Traditional Music Society’s featured act for the evening fell through earlier in the week. Miki had gotten the call from the society on Thursday evening and hastily put Jigabout together—not quite as difficult a prospect as might be imagined since all the musicians she’d rounded up had often played together.

The other members included Emma Jean Wright from Miki’s regular band Fall Down Dancing on guitar. Unlike Miki, Emma Jean was a natural blonde, her corkscrew curls pulled back into a loose braid tonight. And she was tall—slender and wonderfully tall—a source of some envy to Miki, who got well and truly tired of her own diminutive size whenever something was out of her reach, which seemed far too often. Besides playing with Fall Down Dancing, Emma Jean doubled as a member of an all-female bluegrass group called the Oak Mountain Girls where she also played five-string banjo and provided vocals. She was one of the few guitarists Miki knew who could play as well in both styles, highlighting the proper accents of either a Celtic dance tune accompaniment or a flat-picked bluegrass breakdown as required.

Since the other members of Fall Down Dancing weren’t available for tonight, Miki had fallen back on the Wednesday night sessions at The Harp to find a couple of other players, enlisting Amy Scanlon on pipes, whistle, and vocals, and Geordie Riddell on fiddle and flute. Amy and Geordie often played together as a duo and all four of them shared enough material in common that the big problem in putting together the sets they needed for this gig had been in what to leave out.

When they’d arrived at the community center for their sound-check, the society members had been carefully setting out rows of folding chairs in front of the stage. By now, halfway through their first set, the audience had folded most of those chairs back up against the walls and the seating area had been turned into a dance floor. There was even a kind of mosh pit to the right of the stage, right in front of where Miki was sitting, where various punky-looking kids, all piercings and tattoos, and baggy-clothed skateboarder types were pogoing and generally carrying on, not even trying to dance, but having a great time.

Miki knew that the way they carried on bugged some of the more staunch traditionalists. This sort of thing didn’t show the proper respect to the music. But she didn’t care. So long as they were having fun and not interfering with the others who were dancing, let them do what they wanted. Why, she thought with a laugh, if the fancy struck her, she might even have a go at crowd-surfing herself.

When the set of reels they were playing came to an end, Miki grinned at Amy, sitting at the other end of the stage with her pipes across her knees. The two of them had brought the tune to a close with exactly the same twiddly-dum-dee-dum flourish. A wave of applause and stamping feet rose up from the dance floor, drowning out the band’s thank-yous. Looking down at the set list taped to the floor by her feet, Miki wished, and not for the first time, that she could bounce around the stage the way Geordie and Emma Jean could. But she and Amy were locked to their chairs by their instruments.

“Now,” Geordie was saying into the microphone, “we’re going to take you from County Clare, where that last set originated, all the way across the Irish Sea and up into the Shetland Isles for a set of tunes from the playing of Tom Anderson. We’ll start with a hornpipe he wrote for the pianist Violet Tul-loch, then move on into a pair of reels….”

The community center wasn’t set up like a regular concert hall. The stage had some extra lighting on it, but the audience wasn’t lost in the usual sea of darkness. Sitting where she was, Miki could actually see the audience. As Emma Jean started the hornpipe, fingerpicking the melody on her guitar, Miki studied the crowd, looking for familiar faces.

There was her brother Donal with Ellie—shame things hadn’t worked out between them—and the rest of his Crowsea arts crowd, Jilly, Sophie, Wendy, and all. Here and there she spotted regular customers from the store—how had they even known she was playing this gig? The advertising had all been for the previously slated band with only small corrections running in the “What’s On” sections of the papers on Friday and this morning. She recognized some Fall Down Dancing fans, then spied Hunter standing off to one side, near the back.

Amy had joined Emma Jean now, her whistle playing harmonies to Emma Jean’s guitar lines. Hunter lifted a hand when he saw Miki looking at him.

Miki smiled, then looked down at her instrument and pretended to check the workings of her bellows. She could feel a flush coming on and hoped it wasn’t noticeable from the audience—or at least not from where Hunter was standing.

Donal shouldn’t have started in on teasing Hunter at the session the other night, and she shouldn’t have kept it up, because things had been getting a little awkward at the store ever since. Where usually she and Hunter had such an easy rapport between them, now everything felt stilted. She kept catching him studying her, his face a mix of puzzlement and that look some of the regulars got when they were trying to build up the nerve to ask her out. By Friday it had been a relief to be able to have the excuse to take Saturday off to work on material for tonight’s show.

The trouble was, she didn’t know how she felt any more than Hunter knew how he did. For him the idea that she was interested in him would generate the simple relief that, okay, J^ia had dumped him, but he wasn’t a complete loser; other women still found him interesting. She could almost see him working out the difference between his pal Miki and the woman Miki he’d probably never really looked at all that closely before. Certainly not in this way. One thing you could say about Hunter: He was steadfast and true. The whole time he’d been living with Ria, Miki had never once got the sense that he was in the least bit interested in another woman.

For her own part, well, she’d been joking with Hunter at the session, taking it up where Donal had left it off, not at all serious, but it had been cozy, snuggled up beside him at the end there. She’d always looked at Hunter as a friend first, then her boss. Nothing else. Not because she didn’t find him attractive, or charming. Or fun, when it came down to it—the past few weeks notwithstanding. Part of the reason she’d not even considered him as boyfriend material had been because, well, he was taken, wasn’t he? And he was, what? Ten years older?