A Goat's Song

by Dermot Healy

  And not too long afterwards it happened. A cold tremor ran through all the RUC barracks of the North of Ireland. The disarming of the police was forgotten. It was too late. They had become the targets. And now the young policemen felt as Jonathan Adams did. The cry went out for revenge. And orders came through for them to hold their anger.

  It was their turn to walk in fear.

  For years the Church of Ireland had jeered at the Presbyterian’s unrelenting nature, their extremes of evangelism, their tribal fear of change. The lowly Presbyterian that had been the cohort of the Fenian in ’98. In some quarters they were even seen as a radical sect who had again stirred up revolution among the more conservative Roman Catholics. But now the Church of Ireland, too, was a tribe cast out of the land. Death chased them through the shadows. Vodka could not stop it. The minute he entered the station he would find the whiff in the air. The male smell of fear. The smell was there before you reached the door. A yard from the door the stench began. And mixed with it were other odours: the metallic smell from the clips of bullets, magazine oil, poster paint, shoe polish, sweat, and then the scent of male flesh exposed to overpowering heat that came from hundreds of lights. It was always dark in there. There were few windows. And as the day dragged on, even while rain fell, the station would at its core remain intolerably dry. The long hours of dryness were debilitating.

  Feet, tonsils and the upper arms would grow heavy.

  But fear kept the policemen agile. When they lifted their SRN rifles their arms would grow light.

  Still the dryness stayed in the air. Everyone was afraid to leave the station. Even the godless new recruits, joining now in huge numbers because of the pay, crowded round their seniors in friendly banter. They felt trapped within a province that had grown small as a townland. Over short distances they always went by car. The smell went with them. No policeman sat on a bicycle in the province anymore. In four years their wages practically doubled. Tall fences went up outside the existing walls that surrounded each police station. This had been one of Matti Bonner’s last jobs. And even he must have felt it – the sensation of something burning, the sensation of something that was eating up all the oxygen in the air. And perhaps, since he had only a few weeks to live, Matti Bonner may have felt some empathy between himself and these men in olive green – Protestant Zionists some, successful terrorists others; gentlemen who hallucinated, labourers, holy crusaders, farmers’ sons. It was Matti Bonner, the Sergeant’s best man, who, working for a contractor from Enniskillen, helped fence them in.

  Jonathan Adams loved his village. It was neat like the interior of his house. It was ordered, civic, with houses of cut stone, with fine mill walls, a clear stream, fields of potatoes, window boxes with wild flowers in bloom, with the same wild flowers in bloom under the mill walls. Sheep grazed in an orderly fashion and were daubed neatly at the same precise spot, great Charolais cattle grazed, antiques sat on shelves, in gardens, on floors where they had stood for over a hundred years. Eagles from a stonemason’s yard in Enniskillen sat on all the piers.

  Everywhere was the same healthy tradition and yet now Jonathan Adams found himself removed from it all.

  He did not walk the village any more, only took the few steps from his car that led to the new barrier at the station. In time he drove out of the garage adjoining his house and entered the station through a gate that closed automatically behind him. So, in fact, he never had to encounter the public at all. And the first thing he heard, the first thing the new shift heard as they approached the station, was Matti Bonner whistling. He was whistling “Mary from Dunloe”. In time, as the policemen sat into their cars to drive to some new crisis area, they stole his tune. They were whistling a tune about love in the Republic they despised. And when Matti Bonner went home he had taken away something from them. The dryness came with him. The smell of fear.

  It was Sergeant Adams had arranged for the Catholic labourer to find work there. He was his neighbour. It did not strike him as ironic that a Catholic should put up defences that other Catholics would tear down, defences against which other Catholics would hurl stones, petrol bombs, and then, as the war progressed, mortar bombs. He was not to know that the American and Russian rifles he had read about, and which appeared so far away and exotic, would one day be homing in on men who wore his uniform. Or that in a few years workmen like Matti Bonner would have been murdered for collaborating with the enemy. He did not foresee the day when the IRA would get that well organized. For him, Matti Bonner was a man who provoked care and curiosity, who had a knack with machines, who caused no trouble, who spoke contemptuously of priests, who had witnessed his nuptials, who would listen sheepishly to Sergeant Adams’ speculations about the hereafter. We can talk about things, Sergeant Adams would say, we are ordinary men.

  Nevertheless, when Matti Bonner died, he would have wished a priest was with him.

  It is said the spirit of the suicide lingers near the body of the dead person for a very short time. It could well be reasoned that the man who commits suicide has, long before he dies, begun to mourn his own death. When a person dies in an accident, you would expect their spirit to hover around for days, for years. When sickness claims someone, you would expect their spirit to be reluctant to leave, for that person wanted to live. The spirit would long to caress fondly the body in which it once existed, would spread itself round the aged corpse of the cancer-ridden young woman that stood in her prime some months before. But you would expect the spirit of the suicide to part quickly from the physical body which had rejected it. That was Jonathan Adams’ conjecture. He had seen many that died sudden physical deaths, or had endured long drawn out agonies. And their spirit seemed assured of a long stay in the minds and presences of those that had known them. But now, with Matti Bonner’s death, he found the dead man’s spirit would not leave his consciousness. Not because it could not find peace, but out of perversity against the physical world that had rejected it.

  The village seemed to harbour a vengeful spirit. The death of Matti Bonner and the melee in Duke Street became linked in a fatal manner in the Sergeant’s mind.

  Often, in the old days, he used call down to his neighbour. And he’d witness some extraordinary things. The act of life itself was a miracle in Jonathan Adams’ eyes. It seemed at its most fruitful in Matti Bonner. He had a small, cramped, natural face, thin, muscled arms, long legs, and farmer’s hands. He seemed always a satisfied soul, satisfied with his bare routine, his tuneful language, his pathos. That anything even faintly like despair could have occupied his neighbour’s mind was beyond Jonathan Adams. He found Matti the job at the station, but it was with a heavy heart that the Sergeant watched the wire grids go up. That country stations should be fenced in was to declare to the world: This is not only a war, it is going to be a long war.

  For a while the police took shelter there and the British Army took to the streets. And it bred in the police a hopelessness, for they had been trained as an army. There was cowardice in handing over the fighting to another battalion. But because they had always been armed, they had never been real policemen – not as in Britain or the Republic where policemen went unarmed. They had prided themselves on their guns, but now, like a crowd of unruly and cowardly deserters, they had been withdrawn to barracks.

  It was a demoralizing blow to the RUC.

  The province had been taken out of their hands, all for the sake of propaganda.

  Except for their families, they saw no one. They holidayed far from home. In the Canaries, in South Africa, in Greece. Some began moving their homes into protected areas. The thought of leaving the house that Maisie had designed to enter some estate of identical dwellings seemed a travesty. They talked about it, but didn’t move. They were in a Protestant village. It was safe for a while. The place would protect them. But in other parts the cars belonging to policemen became vehicles that careered into eternity. The police, like the rest of the province, began to watch the war from a chair in front of the TV.

&nb
sp; Jonathan Adams would call down to his neighbour’s house to find the dark kitchen filled with gunfire and galloping horses. In his own house he never watched television yet that was where Jonathan Adams sometimes sat in Matti Bonner’s house – before the television, his legs crossed and a look of frustrated revenge in his eye.

  There are two things dear to Northern Ireland Protestant hearts: the royal family in England and the Catholic mind. Especially the Catholic mind of the South. Matti Bonner had been his guide to the South, Maisie his route to the Queen. And Matti was very curious about Ian Paisley. Ian Paisley is very dear to the Catholic mind – he is the most successful Protestant of them all. He had his own religion, and one day he’d have his own political party. The two men, Jonathan and Matti, would sit in the back kitchen over mugs of tea talking about British royalty and the South of Ireland.

  And when silence descended on them, Matti Bonner would talk to Reilly the dog. Then he’d check the back fields when Jonathan Adams was ready to leave.

  “It’s all right, Sergeant,” Matti would say, “you can go.”

  One winter, when Maisie was suffering from weak lungs, Matti gave the Sergeant a blessed piece of felt to spread over his wife’s chest. And to the amazement of the Presbyterian household it brought relief to Maisie. He carried up goat’s milk every second day, for goat’s milk, he claimed, was alive with wild herbs that would cure all ailments of the lung. In return Jonathan Adams took Matti cauliflowers, peas and spring onions. He brought him homemade jam, Maisie’s pear wine and always, at Christmas, a Guinness cake. Matti learned to love Maisie’s cooking.

  “I’ll say this for you,” Matti would say, “the Northern Protestant knows how to ate. The Prod keeps a good table.” It was true. While Matti hurled the heels of his loaves to his dog, or let them go blue with mould, in the Adams house they became bread pudding laced with raisins.

  Any labouring job at the home of the Adamses was sure to go to Matti Bonner.

  “It must be your conscience,” Matti would joke.

  “Indeed,” Maisie’d reply, “we have you to thank for introducing us.”

  “It was dear bought, Missus,” Matti would laugh, and raise his right hand to display the small worsted piece of flesh that did him as a middle finger.

  “I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

  Thus they treated each other as neighbours. At the RUC station, though, for the few weeks he worked there, the two men never spoke. And they never spoke at all of sex, except in jest. So, at a deeper level, where a man might contemplate death, they remained complete strangers to each other. Instead, they spoke of the backwardness of the Catholic South. They made jokes about the huge families of Catholic Northerners.

  “I’m past it now,” Matti would say. “You’ll have no threat from me in that quarter.”

  They spoke of how classless the North was. Homes would be built for everyone, it would all be sorted out. He could recall Matti agreeing, nodding, then he’d look away. But two things that were never mentioned were suicide and Sergeant Adams’ part in the doings on Duke Street. For a few weeks after the news programme that made him such a figure of scorn, Jonathan Adams did not visit Matti Bonner. In fact he feared that Matti might set him up. Meanwhile an enquiry into the televised account of Duke Street took place in Enniskillen. The old policemen from throughout the province gathered. Like criminals they waited to be called in. There was talk of losing seniority, of sackings, of loss of pensions.

  Jonathan Adams, distraught and angry, was led into an office where a young English officer and his Northern Ireland superior from the Police Authority awaited him. They shook hands.

  “I’m sure you have your own reasons for what took place, Sergeant Adams,” the Englishman began.

  “I have.”

  “I shan’t bother going into them now.”

  “We were led to believe we were dealing with the IRA.”

  “IRA or not, Sergeant Adams, we can’t afford to have displays of police violence on the television screens of these islands. I’m sure you are aware of that.”

  “I was not aware of the television’s presence there, sir.”

  “They were there, and they will be there from now on. They have been given by you a veritable feast of police violence.” He felt the back of his neck. “Things will be different from now on, Sergeant Adams. You may have enjoyed years of isolation to assert your prejudices, but those days are over.”

  “I take great exception to your suggestion.”

  “You are not only representing the police, may I remind you, Sergeant, you are representing the Protestant people as well.”

  Jonathan Adams lifted a humiliated eye towards his superior.

  “I take it this was an isolated incident.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I would like you to read this carefully.”

  “Thank you.”

  He was ushered out. He read the new code of conduct for police on duty at demonstrations as he sat in his living room and knew it was all a façade. Public relations was replacing justice. The war had taken a fresh turn. In the new propaganda the Catholic was the victim. He read it and placed it under a pot of jam. Then from his window he saw Matti Bonner. With an enormous sense of relief he saw him moving through the Adams’ orchard collecting apples in a basket while the geese followed behind, yelling. He had returned of his own volition. It was one of the happiest sights Jonathan had ever seen. It meant he was forgiven.

  That night in the labourer’s cottage he watched Coronation Street, followed by a film about mountaineers climbing the sheer rock face of some precipice in Scotland. Matti Bonner, he knew, would have heard or seen the item about Duke Street on the news in a bar, as everyone in Ireland had. But Matti Bonner said nothing. A few times that night Jonathan Adams tried to refer to it in an oblique way, but the Catholic labourer would not be drawn.

  As he sat in the labourer’s kitchen the Sergeant tried to imagine what Matti Bonner felt as he saw his neighbour baton so-called peaceful Catholics. The Sergeant wanted to scream out his innocence, to have Matti Bonner see it all from his perspective. What did Matti Bonner do when he saw it on the TV? Did he shout out in rage? Did he scream out obscenities like the others did in the bar in Belmullet? But to imagine the labyrinths of the Catholic mind was beyond Sergeant Adams. Matti Bonner’s silence he took for blame. As he sat there in his neighbour’s kitchen the feeling he got was of being afloat on the high seas far from land. While he sat making small talk what occupied him was that image of himself on the screen – old, bitter, crazy-eyed. In certain cultures he knew that peasants refused to be photographed for fear the camera would steal their soul away. Now Sergeant Adams understood that superstition perfectly. The RTE man who had filmed him in Duke Street had stolen his soul.

  And the one man – Matti Bonner – who knew of the Sergeant’s distress refused ever to discuss it. Now Jonathan Adams was forever fixed in the mind of the world as a bigot dressed in the uniform of the Queen. He would have done anything to have that image removed from the viewer’s mind. “I saw you on the TV,” old knowing Protestants would say, and he’d wince, and feel an inordinate wish to cease to exist. And yet in Matti Bonner’s kitchen it was as if it had never happened. The labourer made tea, looked into the fire, stirred the burning coals and shook his head at the mystery of the mundane.

  The sound or sight of the TV in those days used to make Jonathan Adams unsure of his own sanity. In it was stored a horrific blasphemy, a soul-destroying accusation. There was nothing worse than to see your own self-image transposed, violated, dehumanized. In Matti Bonner’s kitchen Jonathan Adams sat perplexed as he watched wild dogs roam the plains of South Africa or mountaineers whispering to each other over walkie-talkies while they hung suspended in the high crackling air. And each time the labourer looked at him the Sergeant wondered, yet no word of condemnation was uttered. Matti Bonner kept his silence.

  He kept his silence right up until the last night when Matti stepped out into
the dark night, looked around and said: “All right, Sergeant. It’s safe, you can go.”

  “Thank you, Matti.”

  He stepped into the dark and turned back once to see Matti still standing at the lit kitchen door. He stood there, framed in the small doorway, till the Sergeant had regained the safety of his house, then Matti went in. Not till the following day when the Sergeant saw him hanging from the birch, did the silence of the labourer turn into one long note of defiance.

  Now, along with the image of himself in Duke Street, came another image that would accompany Jonathan Adams for the rest of his life – that of Matti Bonner, hanging in his Sunday trousers and vest, shoeless, from a tree. As he had been dressing himself some demon had gripped him and he’d fled barefoot across the fields to the spot he’d chosen, where all the villagers as they stepped out of church would find him. They would see the tears the barbed wire had made in his trousers and the bloody welts across his thighs. He’d run uncaring through fences. What torment had driven him forward in such haste? Jonathan Adams did not know. When Matti died, Jonathan Adams was shocked at how quickly all signs of the labourer disappeared from the world. What work he had done in the village was quickly absorbed. New and more elaborate defences went up. And Jonathan Adams could no longer holiday in the Catholic dimension. The only kind witness to his other nature had departed this world.

  When he began to live in a world of fear, Jonathan Adams felt an outsider in Northern Ireland. He began to look for an escape. He was too old for Australia. He was too old for South Africa. He thought of Canada. Then one day Maisie brought up the question of the house she’d fallen in love with in Belmullet. The Sergeant was taken aback. “I miss the Republic,” said Maisie.