A Goat's Song

by Dermot Healy

  “The poor fellow,” she said.

  The Sergeant nodded.

  Then she stopped talking. They sat facing a blank wall in the hospital for more than two hours without speaking. Then, again without speaking, they sat another hour each side of the labourer’s bed. Then there was the silent drive home. Hay was being tossed in the fields.

  “I spent my childhood playing in haylofts,” she said.

  “Mine,” he replied, “was spent in police barracks around the North.”

  A few nights later she climbed out of the pantry window and met him on the edge of the private lake. He stood skimming stones across the surface of the moon in the water. She sat with her back to the trunk of a tree.

  “Would you like,” he asked her, “to be buried with my people?”

  She was eighteen when she married Jonathan Adams. He was forty-three. The day before the marriage he drove down to her home place in the townland of Ballindan, just outside Rathkeale, Co. Limerick. Accompanying him was Matti Bonner, the Catholic labourer Maisie had taken to the hospital that day.

  Some time after he proposed Jonathan bought a small house a few miles outside the village. Their nearest neighbour they discovered was Matti Bonner. Since he’d lost his finger in the winch certain types of work were denied him. Maisie hired him to decorate the old house. Having been born in the Republic, she had no religious qualms about knowing Catholics. But the first thing Jonathan Adams did was lift his Fenian ledger to check to see if his new neighbour’s name was in it. It wasn’t.

  Matti Bonner arrived in his blue overalls and with his toolbox. Maisie came out each evening she could get away and gave him instructions. A timber porch was erected round the back. Trellises were raised. Rooms were painted a mint green. He followed her plans exactly. She supervised the plumbing of the kitchen. He ploughed the garden. Set apples trees. Then one night as she and Jonathan sat in the police car surveying the house she said: “I think Matti should be your best man.”

  “You must be out of your mind.”

  “He brought us together,” she said, “and it was a costly experience for him.”

  “It’s not our fault he lost a finger.”

  “If he hadn’t we would not be here.”

  “If that man is to be my best man,” said Jonathan horrified, “there is not one of my family will attend the wedding.”

  “It’s only right that he be our witness.”

  “They won’t come, I tell you.”

  “Maybe they didn’t intend to from the beginning. I don’t think your brother Willy approves of me.”

  “Matti is Catholic.”

  “I know that. But remember you’ll be miles from here. It will all be happening in another part of the world.”

  “I dare say.”

  “Now go up there to his house and ask him.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, right now.”

  Jonathan pulled back the gate and tapped on Matti’s door. The labourer stepped out into the twilight in his vest.

  “Sergeant,” he said.

  “Matti,” said Jonathan.

  They stood there a few moments. “Will you come in?”

  “Oh, no, no, no,” said the Sergeant. “I have a question to put to you.”

  “Aye?”

  “It entails a certain amount of travelling.”

  “I see.”

  “Well, I can bring you down, but you might have to come home on your own.”

  “From where, pray?”

  “The county Limerick. You see, I have never been down there,” he said with embarrassment.

  “I’d be glad to, Sergeant.”

  “Well that’s that then. I should add that the woman out there in the car wants you as my best man.”

  “She does?” asked Matti in amazement.

  They left together the day before the wedding. It was the Sergeant’s first time south of the border that he had so astutely protected all those years and suddenly he found himself on collapsing roads that grew narrow, and then narrower. “Aisy, Sergeant,” said Matti Bonner. Each town was announced by a handball alley and a dance hall. Catholic spires and cathedrals, treeless, flush with Roman excess, sat on the hills while the grey Protestant churches, behind beeches, stood at the end of old-world streets. Gypsy camps, with piles of lead, galavanize sheets and batteries, were scattered on the side of roads. The two men stopped for weak tea, rashers, sausages and eggs in Galway town.

  “What do you think, Sergeant?” asked Matti Bonner.

  “It’s not as bad as I thought.”

  Then as they approached Limerick bunting flew overhead.

  “They must have been expecting us,” said Matti.

  In the centre of the city itself a guard waved them into a parking space. They saw that in every doorway the Holy Family stood.

  “You’ll have to stop there for a bit, I’m afraid,” he said.

  “Is there something wrong?”

  “Not a thing.”

  Jonathan Adams took stock of the guard’s over-sized trousers and dull shoes, the whiskey glint in the eyes.

  “Up North,” said Jonathan, “I might have had that man taken in for questioning.”

  “I’ll just hop over the road for a minute,” said Matti as they waited. “I have to relieve myself.”

  He disappeared into a pub. Then suddenly a gigantic crowd came round the corner celebrating what a banner called the Solemn Novena. Women, praying in blue, passed in marching lines. The Virgin, also in blue, under a white canopy, was steered down the street. Behind her came a priest flanked by altar boys swishing clouds of incense from thuribles. The priest was reading out the rosary through a microphone, and behind him the others answered, heads back, while thousands of beads moved through their fingers.

  When the procession had passed, Matti Bonner climbed back in.

  “I took the chance, if you don’t mind, to get myself a whiskey,” explained the labourer.

  “You can go now,” said the guard, “just cut across through there and you’ll be right as rain for Rathkeale.”

  “Thank you, Constable,” said the Sergeant.

  “Well, lo and behold you,” the guard replied, “that’s the first time I was ever called that.”

  They arrived to Maisie’s farm in the late evening. Old Ruttle greeted them on the doorstep. His daughter, he said, would be down in a few moments. A sloe-coloured sky lay behind the house. Dark-nosed swifts were darting round a snug Dutch barn at the back. A timbered porch, like the one Matti had built in Fermanagh, opened onto a garden of beehives. In the distance was another farm, just like Ruttle’s, and beyond that another, and another, each similar and each with an orchard. And from everywhere came the honk of geese as they roamed the orchards looking for fallen fruit.

  In the kitchen they drank cold lemonade with a ham salad and homemade bread. Maisie shyly made her appearance.

  She took them across the fields to meet her neighbours. Matti Bonner was installed with Walter Bovinger. Jonathan Adams in Arthur Teskey’s. They met Pamela Gilliard, Gareth Shier, Walter Sparling. Hazel Gardener handed the groom a bouquet of freshly picked flowers. They walked up the disused railway that used to take the American emigrants on to Foyle when the seaplanes were in operation. In the cool dark they sat in a handball-alley and kissed.

  The morning of his wedding the geese woke him. An argument had broken out among the birds. He watched the males, with necks lowered, begin battle then he went below. The Teskeys were squeezing blackberries into white pails in the kitchen. He washed, and Arthur Teskey drove him to the church.

  He sat on his empty side one seat ahead of Matti Bonner. The church was bare and dark. The grain in the wooden seats shone. He could smell the Brilliantine from his neighbour’s hair. He heard the steps of the Methodists and the Palatines entering the church. “Good luck, Boss. They’re good auld stock,” whispered Matti. Then, from among the other steps, he picked out hers.

  Afterwards, if she had let him, he would have driv
en straight back to Northern Ireland. Instead, she had him drive her through the Ring of Kerry. On to Kinsale, to Wexford, all the places he had never been. She had him promise that he would take her South each year. They drove to Westmeath, then Monaghan, then home.

  As her family had done in the South, Maisie set apple trees and fed the apples to the geese she bought at Enniskillen market. Now it was the sound of geese that started Jonathan Adams’ days in the North. She set a herb garden. Cherry trees. Placed flower-sprigged pillows and peach sheets in the visitors bedrooms. And in their own – white and navy reversible bed linen. In quick succession, when Jonathan Adams was in his late forties, she had two daughters, Catherine, named after Maisie’s mother, and Sara.

  “They were both conceived in Rathkeale,” she told him.

  “It accounts,” he replied, “for their reluctance to be specific.”

  From the beginning he expected a policeman’s daughters to be beyond reproach. He took them to school, to Sunday school, to services. One on either hand, he descended the barracks steps. He washed them in the bath together. He was an old man graced by the miracle of young daughters. And the first thing their father did when they had learned to speak was to send them to elocution and drama classes. They learned to balance the sound of a word on their palate before they spoke it. He did not want any child of his to find themselves before a congregation or audience stumbling over the meaning of that word “I”.

  They were taught the trumpet and the violin. Maisie made them velvet pouches to place over the chin rests. Their small heads fell sideways behind the bow. A moment’s silence while they fretted and grimaced and tried to remember the tune. He t them to the spring agricultural shows in Enniskillen. Huge brown bulls with white loins stared at them through the railings. Each side of him they stood on Remembrance Days by the monument. They watched the Salvation Army Band and clapped when he clapped.

  Each night he read to them from the scriptures. His daughters and his wife became the congregation he had lost that fateful day in Cullybackey. From her father Catherine first heard warnings against the sins of the flesh through the words lust, carnal, licentious. The words swooped from her father’s tongue onto hers, words that years later used to send dizzy tremors of desire through Jack Ferris.

  “Lust,” Jonathan Adams would say, and the girls could feel it – a surge of feeling that started in the body and entered the spirit like a black wind.

  11

  The News at Six

  Along with geese and apples and Catholics, Maisie Ruttle brought fiction into Jonathan Adams’ life. On the mantelpiece, leaning against a clock shaped like a windmill, were copies of Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac – novels belonging to an earlier generation on Maisie’s side. Jonathan Adams was a widely read man, but unlike his wife or daughters he did not read fiction. Fiction contained inaccuracies, untruths, generalizations, assumptions. The real world was a poor metaphor for what might happen in the hereafter, but at least it was more true than fiction.

  The language of the imagination offered licentious freedom. It acquired trappings, idols, delusions, false promises, too much madness. Not till Matti Bonner died did Jonathan Adams rediscover fiction. And this was his attempt at trying to recall Matti Bonner’s life. That life, which he had presumed he was familiar with, now grew strange.

  He could not place his hand on the facts. Yet throughout his life Jonathan Adams at heart was a reader. The real world, with its physical discomforts, could not accommodate the shocking facts that remained to the fore in his brain. He wanted knowledge of God, and though he baulked at attributing to Him human qualities, this he did, in the full awareness of the fragility of human knowledge when faced with the Uncognoscibility of the Absolute, as John Stuart Mill called it.

  For Jonathan Adams reality was scripture. It was the sacred history of a people finding their God. So, though Jonathan might wish to transcend history, he grew to love its bare inviolable physicality. As a reader, like many of his age, he had turned to autobiographies, to biography, to see how others had succeeded in dealing with their demons. He had entered again that boyish period of life when the mind selects figures: the numbers on opposing sides in the siege of Derry; the numbers on opposing sides in the Battle of the Boyne; the number of languages spoken when we were given the gift of tongues. Is life not tuned more to the ear than to the eye? How many royals died of choking on fish bones? How many royals were afflicted by small gullets? How many Napoleons existed? How many Jews? How many gypsies? How many Ulstermen died at the Somme? What was the number of Presbyterians that travelled in the Famine ships to America? He traced Carson’s lineage and counted the number of homosexual politicians in Britain. He estimated the number of Catholics in the world. How many Protestants died at the hands of the Godfathers of the Roman Church in the Inquisition? How many Ulster Protestants died, were tortured, had their breasts sheared off by blood-thirsty Catholics on 23 October 1641, the feast of Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits? 30,000? 40,000? 50,000? Who was Roger Casement? What are Rome’s finances? How war-worthy were Russian tanks? Did the Russians actually try to send messages through space by means of brain waves? Was it true that Communism only flourished in Catholic countries? How many Jews died so that their blood could be shipped to the front to keep the German Army going? He read magazines on American rifles, on wild pheasants in Ireland. Articles on Paisley. Biographies of American presidents, histories of the Boer War, the Second World War. Geese. Peel and the Law and Order Bill of 1852.

  “You must read Pride and Prejudice,” said Maisie, “that at least.”

  “No,” replied the Sergeant.

  He gave her no moral or high-minded reason. Sometimes he might counter with the weak excuse that fiction was the outcome of idleness, that it was fantasy rather than fiction, but the real reason was that he had a fine memory which could not be induced to recall an imagined narrative. He read fiction as a child, but in the aftermath it remained a blur. Fiction was the shameful stories prisoners made up to escape prison. It was created to obscure guilt. Fiction for him was irreligious, the act of imagination itself was a door opening onto the void. His mind baulked at characters who entered the first line of a novel but did not reside in the real world. In truth, what did not come from the Bible was fiction.

  Yet, he was addicted to mythology. Here there was no author, the author had been erased through time. And so the characters thrived, they became real. The New Testament, though it was told through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, presented no problem. The author was Jesus, and he was not of this world.

  The Old Testament was the history of memory itself.

  At school, Jonathan Adams had been an outstanding Biblical scholar. The story of the Bible was for him like a roll call of everything that existed in nature and in himself.

  The name Abraham sounded like an Indian gong that called the people to morning prayer. It was a wide primal landscape. It was a name given by simple men to a simple man. Abraham was one of the first words breathed by men. As men were naming the colours and the plants and the animals, they were naming each other. In the word Abraham were deserts, famine, emigration ships. In his private world, as he drove or walked, here and there, when he lay down before sleep, lines from the Book of Job would stir in Jonathan Adams’ mind and haunt his subconscious.

  It was the people’s book. They had named the flowers and the rain. They had recreated the world being made before their very eyes in a language given them by God. The movements of the tribes were poems. The translations of the Bible by Wycliffe into English, Luther into German, Calvin into French had extended and enriched all those languages more than ever poetry or drama or fiction had. And yet the story was intended for simple men. Their ears did not sleep. They were simple exact words.

  At Pentecost, the gift of first fruits, he could actually hear that sound from heaven fill the room they were in. He imagined the eleven tongues of fire leaping over the heads of the 120 members of the congregation. The words the Holy Spiri
t gave them were words of law. As the Spirit gave utterance, the people named the world.

  And when the world was created the angels shouted for joy!

  The people had named the oak and the ash. The parts of the body, the brain. And they named the places where they had stood. They had named the ancient places of Ireland. Places were not a statistic. They were where language stood still, where people had settled before they moved on. But Jonathan Adams, and his people, had come to stay. And he himself, though he did not know it then, was to become one of his most uncherished statistics. Already fate was preparing that path for him.

  Meanwhile, he read, he wrote out summonses, he cycled to his barracks through Ulster’s quiet years, he felt safe as a policeman.

  It was being a policeman saved Jonathan Adams from continuing as an evangelist. Sometimes when he listened to Willy he was shocked and enthralled by his brother’s lack of intellectualism, the lack of humility. His shameless oratory made the Sergeant wince. Jonathan Adams did not want to hear the words read out. The policeman in him did not want to hear raised voices. And it was being a policeman brought Jonathan Adams face to face with an element in himself he would rather never have encountered.