The lower orders are never half so happy as at a wake—when they can procure candles, punch, a piper, and tobacco, to enable them to sit and smoke round a human corpse! No matter what death it suffered, or disorder it died of (except indeed the bite of a mad dog). Their hilarity knows no limits; their humorous phrases and remarks flow in a constant stream of quaint wit and pointed repartee, but not in the style or tone of any other people existing. The wake is also their usual place of match-making; and the marriages or misfortunes of the ladies are generally decided on “going home from the wake.”
The cheerfulness of the wake, however, is intermitting:—every hour or two the most melancholy howling that human voices could raise is set up by the keeners, and continued long enough to give the recurrence to mirth and fun increased excitement. These keeners, or mourners, are a set of old women, who practise for general use the most lachrymose notes, high and low, it is possible to conceive—which they turn into a sort of song (without words), at one time sinking into the deepest and most plaintive strains, then, on a sudden, raised into a howl, loud, frightful, and continued nearly to a shriek; and then in long notes descending in a tone of almost supernatural cadence.
They say that this is mimicking wicked souls “undergoing their punishment in purgatory,” and is used as a defiance to the devil, and to show him that the corpse they are waking does not care a “mass for him.” But then, they never trust the corpse to be left alone, because it could make no resistance to Belzebub if he came for it; and a priest always remains in the room to guard the body, if the keeners should happen to go away.
If you ask a country fellow how he can be so merry over a “dead man”—
“Ough! plase your honour,” he will probably reply, “why shouldn’t we be merry when there’s a good corpse to the fore?”
“What do you mean?”
“Mane is it?—fy, sure enough, your honour, Father Corcoran says (and the devil so good a guess in the town-land) that after the month’s mind is over, Tom Dempsey, the corpse, will be happier nor any of us.—Ough! your honour! hell to the rap of tythe-cess or hearth-money, he’ll have to pay proctor nor parson!—There’s many a boy in the parish, plase your honour, would not object to be Tom Dempsey, the corpse, fresh and fasting, this blessed morning!”
If you begin to reason with him, he will perhaps say—“Why, plase your honour, sure it’s only his corpse that’s corpsed;—after the masses he’ll be out of pain, and better off nor any gentleman in this same county, except our own landlord, God bless him up or down!”
If you seem to think the defunct’s family will be unhappy in consequence of his death—
“Oh, plase your honour! Tom was a good frind, sure enough, and whilst there’s a shovel and sack in the neighbourhood his family won’t be let to want nothing any how.”