Shortly before his sixteenth birthday, he left home, a few precious punts in his pocket. He dreamed of more than plowing the fields and milking the cow, much more than the pennies gathered at the little pub in Glendree. His soaring tenor could bring a tear to the eye, and his agile body and fast, clever feet lift the spirit when he danced. He’d learned how to shear a sheep and slaughter a lamb, to milk a cow and build a rock wall.Īnd he remembered, the whole of his long life, the nights his family sat around the fire-the smell of peat smoke, the angel-clear voice of his mother raised in song, his father smiling at her as he played the fiddle.Īs a boy he’d sometimes earn a few pennies singing in the pub while the locals drank their pints and talked of farming and politics. He’d known from an early age the backbreaking work of plowing a field behind a horse named Moon. He’d lost an uncle and his oldest brother in the first Great War, had grieved for a sister who’d died before her eighteenth birthday delivering her second child. He’d known hunger in the lean times, had never forgotten the taste of his mother’s bread and butter pudding-or the whip-swat of her hand when he’d earned it. When Liam Sullivan died, at the age of ninety-two, in his sleep, in his own bed with his wife of sixty-five years beside him, the world mourned.īorn in a little cottage tucked in the green hills and fields near the village of Glendree in County Clare, he’d been the seventh and last child of Seamus and Ailish Sullivan.
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