American Gods

That evening Shadow laid an extra place at the table. He put a glass at each place, and a bottle of Jameson Gold in the middle of the table. It was the most expensive Irish whiskey they sold at the liquor store. After they ate (a large platter of leftovers left for them by the women) Shadow poured a generous tot into each glass—his, Ibis’s, Jacquel’s, and Mad Sweeney’s.

“So what if he’s sitting on a gurney in the cellar,” said Shadow, as he poured, “on his way to a pauper’s grave. Tonight we’ll toast him, and give him the wake he wanted.”

Shadow raised his glass to the empty place at the table. “I only met Mad Sweeney twice, alive,” he said. “The first time I thought he was a world-class jerk with the devil in him. The second time I thought he was a major fuckup and I gave him the money to kill himself. He showed me a coin trick I don’t remember how to do, gave me some bruises, and claimed he was a leprechaun. Rest in peace, Mad Sweeney.” He sipped the whiskey, letting the smoky taste evaporate in his mouth. The other two drank, toasting the empty chair along with him.

Mr. Ibis reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a notebook, which he flipped through until he found the appropriate page, and he read out a summarized version of Mad Sweeney’s life.

According to Mr. Ibis, Mad Sweeney had started his life as the guardian of a sacred rock in a small Irish glade, over three thousand years ago. Mr. Ibis told them of Mad Sweeney’s love affairs, his enmities, the madness that gave him his power (“a later version of the tale is still told, although the sacred nature, and the antiquity, of much of the verse has long been forgotten”), the worship and adoration in his own land that slowly transmuted into a guarded respect and then, finally into amusement; he told them the story of the girl from Bantry who came to the New World, and who brought her belief in Mad Sweeney the leprechaun with her, for hadn’t she seen him of a night, down by the pool, and hadn’t he smiled at her and called her by her own true name? She had become a refugee, in the hold of a ship of people who had watched their potatoes turn to black sludge in the ground, who had watched friends and lovers die of hunger, who dreamed of a land of full stomachs. The girl from Bantry Bay dreamed, specifically, of a city where a girl would be able to earn enough to bring her family over to the New World. Many of the Irish coming into America thought of themselves as Catholics, even if they knew nothing of the catechism, even if all they knew of religion was the Bean Sidhe, the banshee, who came to wail at the walls of a house where death soon would be, and Saint Bride, who was once Bridget of the two sisters (each of the three was a Brigid, each was the same woman), and tales of Finn, of Oísin, of Conan the Bald—even of the leprechauns, the little people (and was that not the biggest joke of the Irish, for the leprechauns in their day were the tallest of the mound folk) . . .

All this and more Mr. Ibis told them in the kitchen that night. His shadow on the wall was stretched and birdlike, and as the whiskey flowed Shadow imagined it the head of a huge waterfowl, beak long and curved, and it was somewhere in the middle of the second glass that Mad Sweeney himself began to throw both details and irrelevancies into Ibis’s narrative (“. . . such a girl she was, with breasts cream-colored and spackled with freckles, with the tips of them the rich reddish pink of the sunrise on a day when it’ll be bucketing down before noon but glorious again by supper . . .”) and then Sweeney was trying, with both hands, to explain the history of the gods in Ireland, wave after wave of them as they came in from Gaul and from Spain and from every damn place, each wave of them transforming the last gods into trolls and fairies and every damn creature until Holy Mother Church herself arrived and every god in Ireland was transformed into a fairy or a saint or a dead King without so much as a by-your-leave . . .

Mr. Ibis polished his gold-rimmed spectacles and explained—enunciating even more clearly and precisely than usual, so Shadow knew he was drunk (his words, and the sweat that beaded on his forehead in that chilly house, were the only indications of this)—with forefinger wagging, that he was an artist and that his tales should not be seen as literal constructs but as imaginative recreations, truer than the truth, and Mad Sweeney said, “I’ll show you an imaginative recreation, my fist imaginatively recreating your fucken face for starters,” and Mr. Jacquel bared his teeth and growled at Sweeney, the growl of a huge dog who’s not looking for a fight but can always finish one by ripping out your throat, and Sweeney took the message and sat down and poured himself another glass of whiskey.

“Have you remembered how I do my little coin trick?” he asked Shadow with a grin.

“I have not.”