A Goat's Song

by Dermot Healy

  Nothing survived the winters in Belmullet it seemed. To set a shelter belt became an obsession for the Adamses, as it was for all the people of Mullet.

  But these revelations were all in the future. Those first weekends they spent there they set whatever came to hand. Cuttings from their garden in Fermanagh. Cuttings from the old Presbyterian Church. Good weather saw roses blossoming. Jonathan Adams carried the seamen’s Madonnas into a back shed. Then Maisie began to saw logs. The girls searched the beaches for stones to make a rockery. And he sat in a maple rocking chair, with a long sloping Boston back, that he’d bought in Sligo town, and in the long evening he rocked to and fro in the room he had chosen as his study, high in the north gable, with a view to Scotchport, and beyond that, the great dunes, where blown sand reached heights of near three hundred feet.

  It was enough for him to know that it was out there waiting. All he had to do was to give it time. For years he had lain awake listening for the crash of glass as the window came in. Now it was the constant wind from the Atlantic he heard, walloping the rocks and scattering stinging sand. He watched the lines of tractors bearing turf home, and bought a trailer load. The farmer heeled it up against the side of the house and the family in the evenings tried building the sods into pyramid-shaped stacks like those of their neighbours.

  Attacked by midges, they persevered haphazardly throughout the weekend, but only succeeded in leaving behind them a crumbling, half-finished stack of sods, all awry and proud and shapeless, when they left for home. Three weeks later they returned to find that some nameless neighbour had finished it in their absence. It stood beside the gable wall, tidy and perfect as a hermit’s beehive hut. This was a miracle in Jonathan Adams’ eyes. He tried to imagine from the look in the eye of neighbours passing who it was had built his turf house for him, but no one owned up.

  He imagined that someone would call, and refer to it, this favour they had done the Adamses, but no one did.

  “It was a very Christian act,” said Jonathan Adams.

  “I wonder,” laughed Maisie, “should I leave my dirty washing out?”

  “Sometimes woman, I despair of you.”

  They invited local carpenters in to pull out the cupboards. They paid their bills in Irish pound notes. Sometimes of an evening, Jonathan Adams accompanied Maisie for a walk on the beach. People called out to them and they called back. It was a new experience. To find they could befriend Catholics without appearing Fenian-lovers. It was a great release that first summer. A night sky illuminated every ten seconds by three sweeping flashes of light from Eagle Island. When they woke in the middle of the night, they waited for them: the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

  In the year of his retirement Sergeant Adams and his wife became dependent, like many other Northerners, Catholic and Protestant, on their hideaway in the South. By locals they were seen as romanticists. They were the preservers of old Romantic Ireland.

  They were delighted that complete strangers on country roads waved at their car. The finger of a Southerner would rise peasant-like to the forehead in a gesture that was individual, submissive and comic. The girls were taken by these greetings, and tried to mime the movements in the car. A single finger to the temple, a raised palm, a small sweep of the hand, an index finger pointed to the sky. A single, solitary thumb. A nod. A downward nod of the chin. A huge wink.

  It could be simple-minded, it could be tradition, it could be habit, but somehow it soothed them. Yet, it never struck them that when they were walking on a country road they, too, should salute the strange car approaching them. Only when it had gone by would they remember. They were conscious of this restraint. And the gesture, when they tried it, appeared contrived.

  The South was a museum in which Jonathan Adams, at least, wandered as a stranger. It stored quaint phrasing, soft vowels, superstitions, unpunctual tradesmen, maddening longueurs, stray donkeys. Shouts at midday, cheers at midnight. And no violence. Goats strolled the village. Turf went over and back. Swans flew. And the price of goods changed every day. They bought old crockery. Had a second-hand range from an old estate cottage installed. They queried the cost of everything and drove miles for bargains.

  Like everyone else who came there to visit, they deplored the new bungalows, the stone houses ruined by pebble-dash, the absence of flowers, the untidiness. They considered the prices of certain goods horrendous. They considered it contemptible that the Southern farmers had abandoned husbandry. They wanted to see the old style of thatched cottage remain.

  They walked the beach. Sergeant Adams had found a home from home, and carefully ignorant of the politics of the South, he walked the unending bogs thinking of the politics of the North. Evenings, he drove with Maisie and sat in his car to watch the salmon boats coming in to Ballyglass pier.

  Here again he might by chance have seen Jack Ferris. For Jack, that year, had left college and come to Mullet to work the fishing boats for the summer. Perhaps one day it might have been Jack Ferris’ turn to toss the rope onto the pier, and the old Sergeant might have held it till the boat was secured. The fishermen got to know him and sold him plastic bags of herring, or pollack. Sometimes they refused his money, but he would have none of that.

  “We’d be throwing them away anyway,” they’d say.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t have that,” he’d reply and try to press the money upon them.

  He admired the dour unspeaking presence of the fishermen when they returned after a long haul in the Atlantic. They’d step off the boat onto the pier like zombies. Their eyes would have a glazed, exhausted look, a mindlessness. Yet they’d carry out what duties remained. Jonathan Adams would have admired that, tired men finishing what they’d begun.

  On days like that he did not approach them but sat in the car watching while Maisie sewed. From the safety and privacy of their car they watched events and people all over the peninsula.

  Guilt and strangeness had fixed Jonathan Adams in the role of observer of a culture that satisfied some tortured need in him. It was a culture to which he could not belong, but felt he once had when that same culture had existed in its purest form, as it had once on Inishglora, Island of Purity.

  The mechanics of everyday political life in the Irish Republic were a source of constant amusement to the Adamses. Like many Northerners, Catholic and Protestant, they felt superior to the Southern Irish in education, in manners, in politics, in commerce. The war in Northern Ireland had made them very sophisticated political creatures.

  The civil war in the South and the insurrection of 1916 were trivial affairs compared to the Somme, to the cruel undertow the Loyalists felt dragging at them.

  Yet when the summer ended, and they returned with their wailing geese to the stricter regime in Northern Ireland, their lives were racked by the pervasive sentiment of their summer home. Names of neighbours and their doings in Belmullet and the rest of the peninsula were more commonplace topics of conversation among the Adamses than were their neighbours in Fermanagh or the increasing violence in the North. Soon they began going down every weekend, though the drive took more than three hours. They installed an old fashioned, balloon-like leather suite. Desk lamps. Set sea-holly. The girls hung Chinese bells. Did their home work for the college in Fermanagh while looking out on the wild seas of the Atlantic. Bit by bit they were trying to banish from the house the temporary air.

  Jonathan Adams would hear of all that was happening on the peninsula through his daughters and his wife. Maisie read the Southern papers to him as they sat close to the range in the draughty kitchen. The kitchen was always cold. They never succeeded in getting the range going at full heat because of the spartan amounts of coal and turf they added. They were divided between two houses. In the North, heat sped through the house. They had an electric cooker, a fridge. In Mullet, in a house twice the size of the other, they cooked on a picnic stove for more than a year, kept food in plastic boxes, added single sods of turf to a miserable fire.

  It was in these conditions t
hat Jonathan Adams heard how Mr Blaney, who had been involved in the arms trial that toppled the Irish government a few years before, was now running as a Euro-MP; that Mr Haughey, thrown from a horse and out of his party, was now installed in power again; Gay Byrne was opening boutiques; a Mayo bishop was calling for an International Airport in Knock. The Adamses gossiped scandalously and bitterly in low whispers about Irish hypocrisy, and took hot water bottles to bed.

  It was a temporary sojourn, or so it appeared at first.

  Soon their summer journeys to the South spread into the autumn, into the early spring. One year, they spent Christmas there with the girls. A wind of a ferocity they had never before experienced kept them indoors for the entire festival. Instead of news about Northern Ireland they began to listen to weather reports from Radio Éireann, something they had never done before.

  They waited as the voice ran through all the meteorological stations round Ireland, then at last it came: And now Belmullet. For the two weeks they were there, the wind averaged 12.3 knots with gusts of over 90 mph. The Atlantic gales from the west never ceased. Maisie watched, with a sense of sadness, the few plants that still remained being driven parallel with the ground. The wind whipped the breath out of the bodies of the girls when they ran outside for turf. Sheets of black plastic flew by.

  Now they understood for the first time the sheer strength of the house they’d bought. They grew grateful to the Irish Lights Commission who had built these two-storey dwellings for families on leave from the lighthouses of north-west Mayo. The slate roofs remained intact. Rain burst from the gutters and spilled in a wind-frenzy across the yard, but stone drains took it away.

  During their first storm there the Adamses sat in the draughty kitchen reading, or else remained in bed while the demonic elements raged. Jonathan Adams, wrapped in a blanket, could be found every day somewhere to the back of the left window on the first floor seated by the desk in his study. Draughts blew from every aperture. The windows shook. The third night, the lights gave. A pole was down somewhere. The neighbours offered Maisie candles. In the kitchen at night the girls read extracts from the classics, and acted out little maidenly parts.

  “I used to act too,” suddenly Maisie declared.

  Under pressure, she agreed to perform. She disappeared for a while. The candles were blown out. Then she entered, bowed low, a candle flaring in one hand, a key shaped from the Irish Times in the other. Her head was crowned by the Sergeant’s panama hat draped with a black veil.

  She turned to the audience, and genuflected demurely.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the task of time goes on and on without our knowing. With my key I keep the hands turning. With my oil can I keep the parts oiled. Oh, the clock says, when she hears me coming, he is coming at last.”

  Slowly, burdened down with age, she took a chair across the room, stood on it, and began to wind the air in front of her, while she sang a demure rendition of what had once put her name on the Scripture Cup in Rathkeale – Maisie Ruttle 1st Prize: The German Clock Winder.

  The old clock winder

  He did it by night

  He did it by night

  And he did it by day

  With my turaluma luma luma

  Turaluma luma luma

  Tura liay,

  Tura liura liura liay,

  Turaluma luma luma

  Turaluma luma luma

  Tura liay

  Then they all joined in

  Tura li-ura li-ura liay

  And she blew the candle out. The girls began to stamp the floor for more.

  “Dooo! Dooo!” Maisie hollered, imitating the hoot of a railway train, “The train from Ballingrane is leaving for the seaplanes in Foynes. Dooo! Dooo! Last change for Askeaton, Foynes and America. Dooo! Doooooo!”

  “Dooo! Dooo!” hollered Catherine.

  “Dooo! Dooo! Dooo! Dooo!,” shouted Sara.

  The kitchen filled up with whistling trains.

  On their second night without electricity they were playing patience with the light-keepers’ deck of cards in the wavering flame from the butts of candles. Then the postman who lived across the road came with an oil lamp and a small drum of oil, and pounded on their door.

  Joe Love trimmed the wick and set it on the table.

  “That’ll keep you going,” he said.

  “Will you have tea?”

  “Ah no, no, no.” He looked at the cards spread out.

  “Have ya heard of 25? That’s the boy to set you thinking.”

  “I never learned,” said Maisie.

  “It’s never too late, Ma’am.”

  Over the next few hours, he taught them the meaning of the five of trumps; the ace of hearts; the highest in the red, the lowest in black. He said: “That’s a very poor fire you have on there.” Dismayed they watched him pile on turf and coal. “You wouldn’t want to be holding back on the hate in this weather,” he advised.

  “Now,” he said, “that you have the 25, the next thing you should do is learn the Irish.”

  “The language?” Jonathan Adams asked.

  “What else is there? You have two bright daughters there.”

  “Is it hard?” asked Catherine.

  “Hard? Indeed there’s nothing aisy. It would while away the hours for you.”

  After he was gone, the game of 25 and talk of learning Irish became the major pastime throughout the rest of the storm. Otherwise they read. Jonathan Adams fled biography for Irish history in a volume going back to his grandfather’s time, till eventually, as a buttress against idiocy, he began reading early Irish mythology. To his knowledge of Moses and King Henry, in the year after his retirement, he added the trials of Cuchulainn and Ferdia on the ford, and stayed his hand momentarily, with a shiver of anticipation, over The Salmon of Knowledge, thinking, I’ll leave that for again.

  Life in the South was the beginning of freedom for the girls. To curtail them as he’d done at home would only draw attention to Jonathan Adams. He disapproved and yet consented when they asked to attend dances in the Barber’s Hall. Discos in Belmullet. The Chieftains in Castlebar. The Dubliners in Pontoon.

  They dropped the girls off at the door of the hall, and while they danced the Sergeant and Maisie drove round the various towns, or walked along a beach. At twelve they were back at the door of the dance to escort their daughters home. Soon, they relented and let them go by bus. Then eventually, they saw them off in a neighbour’s car.

  The beach was where the girls spent their days. Being within earshot of the waves was not enough. They’d walk up against the waves and climb the rocks, and sit there talking on summer evenings. Once, they found a tunnel formed by fallen rocks that led to an undisturbed pool. Because there was no place to stand or hang on to, they didn’t stay in the pool too long. They’d swim there a little, then go back through the tunnel, flick themselves across the stones then, surfacing, kick on their backs for the shore, step out, sit up on the rocks and talk.

  It would be too easy to imagine that they were talking of men. But the girls never talked about men directly. Their experiences were told as if they had happened to some other. They laughed at how men, in their excitement, would wet their trousers with semen.

  “If a girl had a wee fellow knocking up against her,” Catherine might say, “and she knocks back, do you think she might hurt him?”

  Or Sara might say: “What would it be like for a girl to take one man after another into her?”

  “Oh, can you do that? Wouldn’t one of them mind?” asks Catherine.

  “It must be strange to have something hanging off you like that,” says Sara.

  Catherine tucks her elbows in against her ribs and blows out as if she has the shivers.

  Each remembers how coitus is described in a medical tome of their father’s. How the organs are drawn in quick blue-and-white sketches. Their imaginations make certain words leap off the page. Words go beyond what they mean. They slacken, stand, grow moist. They mushroom at first light. They steal yo
ur breath away. For Catherine it is the word intercourse. For Sara, who has lately begun to masturbate vigorously, it is two phrases: the penis at rest, the penis erect. It has a Biblical sound – the penis. When Catherine touches herself she thinks of her body opening like a moist flower. Their heads are filled with dangerous diagrams and words that all arrow towards men. Each word points to the loins. None points towards the heart, the lungs, the brain.

  They brave guilt and condemnation. They are glad their bodies contain the evil they do.

  Humming of sex, the girls walk Corrloch. The Mullet boys lower their eyes. This is very enticing for the girls. The boys follow the thrust of the girls’ calves, each slip of the heel, then, dry-mouthed, begin shouldering each other. The cry is issuing from someone else’s throat. Someone else is having what they can only dream of.

  Summers belong to the Adams girls.

  “I don’t want to go,” said Catherine.

  “I don’t want to go back there,” she said. She found her mother at her again. The room was still dark. She could not tell where she had been. Her mother swung her feet on to the floor and, shivering, Catherine hurried from her nightgown into her dress in one blind movement, then immediately into her coat. Sara was already in the kitchen. Both school briefcases were packed. No fire was lit. “Do we have to go?” Catherine asks. “Yes,” Maisie says. Cold, disorientated, like sleepwalkers, the girls follow their parents to the car. Dawn is just breaking on the Atlantic and the sea is wild. Everything is blowing. There is hardly a word said as they drive through the salty light. Even the geese are quiet. The girls prop their chins on their palms and look far beyond what they see. Leaving Mullet again for Fermanagh, an intense nostalgia overcomes them. A fondness.

  Jonathan asked his daughters: “What are the three laughing stocks of the world?”

  “An angry man,” answered Sara, “a jealous man, and I can’t remember the other.”