by Dermot Healy
It took ages before they could settle down once they went home. Then in Fermanagh he’d remember what they had learned in Mullet from MacDonagh. And it all appeared unreal. The verse of Dail Ó Higgins, the verse of Eogan Ó Rathaille. A smattering of Ó Raifteiri and Brian Merriman’s “Cuirt an Mhean Oiche”, whose obscenity and vulgar feminism was of a physical variety the girls had deeply appreciated, while the Sergeant, expecting the usual lyrical soft-heartedness, was dumbfounded. And MacDonagh learned from them that Northern Presbyterians were a dangerous tribe. And all breathed a sigh of relief when, followed by a charge of angry geese, MacDonagh, after two weeks instead of three, took himself away. Sara moved back to her room and sprayed it with deodorant to kill the smell of the Irish teacher. The sheets from his bed were boiled, and the empty bottles of stout stored in the wardrobe were returned to O’Malley’s.
“I wonder what the next fellow will be like?” said the Sergeant pensively, one afternoon the following summer. And the three women looked at each other in trepidation at what lay ahead for them in Jonathan Adams’ search for some marvellous reconciliation.
15
O’Muichin and the Cléirseach
Catherine was standing on the step of the house weeding the fishnet globes of earth and flowers that hung each side of the porch when he alighted. Thomas O’Muichin was covered in sweat and still awed by all he had seen on the bicycle ride from Castlebar to Westport, and Westport to Belmullet. He had cycled to Corrloch on a trim blue three-speed bicycle that had accompanied him, rocking on a chain in the guard’s van at the rear of the Castlebar train, from Dublin. He beat his knee with his cap, tossed the bike against the pier of the gate and saluted Catherine with the tip of the index finger to the eyebrow. “Hallo, Miss.” This was followed by a stoic study of the inside of his cap, and a shy look back the way he had come.
“Am I at the right place?” he asked.
“Yes, but my father’s not here at present. He is off having tests done in hospital.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. My name is Thomas O’Muichin.”
“I know. I hope you are nothing like the fellow we had last summer.”
“Why?” he asked. “Who was he?”
“He was called MacDonagh.” Then she added as a reproach, “And he was called Thomas, too.”
“Oh.” O’Muichin shook his head and whistled soundlessly. “Isn’t that something.”
The new teacher was a small retiring fellow, possessed of an incredible sense of gentleness, or lightness. A Dublin teacher had been chosen this time because Dublin Irish, although impure, was supposedly easier to learn.
But again Jonathan Adams was trying to save himself from too much familiarity with the natives. His rejection at the hands of the powers-that-be in Dublin still rankled. Then the editor of the Western People returned some interviews with local people he had supplied, with a note to the effect that the material was not relevant. Would be slightly obscure for local readers. In fact, he was trying to imply, the worship of graven images on the west coast of Ireland was a tall story. Well, Jonathan Adams would rectify that. What he intended to do was to immerse himself so completely in the old language that he might emerge one day from his home able to talk to all on an equal footing.
Maisie and Jonathan arrived back from the hospital to find O’Muichin finishing a dry-stone wall that had collapsed at the back of the house. They were taken aback at the stature of the cheerful teacher. The Adams had not expected an imp to arrive from Dublin. O’Muichin’s feet barely touched the ground and his movements were those of a man treading water. He was forever on his bike, visiting Irish speakers in the area, head erect, buoyant and somehow soulless, or maybe all soul; his was a condition where body and soul were always on the move. He was domiciled in Catherine’s room this time. “For variety’s sake,” Jonathan Adams pronounced. So Catherine’s wardrobe was moved into Sara’s room, and a coin tossed each night to see who would sleep on the outside of the bed.
The Sergeant did not advance straight away to meet O’Muichin, feeling, perhaps, that things had got out of control, that he should have called a halt to this procession of Irish teachers through his house, men set on turning myth into reality, and by virtue of their crude and unstable natures ruining his repose. But then O’Muichin presented himself at the study door and said: “I hate these particulars, but I have never done the likes of this before.” For the new teacher to admit such ignorance was a consolation to Jonathan Adams. Now he foresaw fruitful hours ahead, when he, after regaining his rightful place as master of the house, might probe the genial Irish spirit, rather than be afflicted by the troublesome psyche MacDonagh had presented.
He felt O’Muichin was a man in whom the grudge was spent. No bitterness remained. So he took to O’Muichin. And O’Muichin found a further ally in Maisie Adams when, after supper, he rose and carried the dishes into the scullery in the manner of a man who lived alone.
“It’s a matter of habit,” he explained, then becoming distant, he took himself to his room.
For such a small man his snores that night carried throughout the house. But unlike his predecessor, he did not spend an age in the outdoor toilet reading from the squares of torn newspapers and inserting bizarre political comments in the margins of books, nor did he distress the girls by betraying the male weakness for innuendo and domination. His shyness was a bonus all round. He was a man, they all agreed, frightened of familiarity. Yet, especially for Mr Adams, a man whose words were both reassuring and intelligent.
And like all men who think in two languages, he was given to the odd discourse on this condition.
A language is for thinking in, O’Muichin had explained over supper. He grew verbose and animated. The original images are sometimes in Irish, he said, and the English occurs only by way of explanation. Sometimes, with concepts, the opposite is true. The new language is merely the learning of an old and well-tried discipline, he said, for which our senses – tired of the language we usually express ourselves in – cry out. A language will return to its source, even in a stranger’s head. The great joy is selecting from various languages what best expresses the content of the mind. “I’m lost,” said Catherine. Immediately the new teacher entertained the vapours, as if someone had just tightened his bodice, and a nervous ennui ensued. This malodorous silence continued until Sara said something to Catherine, then struck by an obscure thought, O’Muichin shot a notebook out of his pocket and scribbled some comment down. He looked up, found where he was and resumed his vacant air.
“We consider shapes, we do,” he said out of the blue, “not colours. And another thing, you can’t say ‘I love you’ in Irish. Don’t let them tell you otherwise. In Irish the love is on you. It’s not yours to command. Yes,” he added thought-fully.
O’Muichin hailed from the inner city, he was a working-class Gaelgoir, and he was glad to be away from Dublin for a time. The wages he earned as a schoolteacher he spent publishing his own books. “Yeats did it, so why shouldn’t I?” he explained. Fantasies was his first publication.
“Fantasies?” asked the Sergeant.
“Yes, and I’m presently preparing Part II.”
“These, I take it, are not of a ribald nature.”
“The Fianna tales, Mr Adams. The Táin. I use these as my stepping off point.”
“You might point out your sources to me,” said the Sergeant, in scholarly vein, “if you have the time.”
“Delighted,” replied O’Muichin.
But for a man occupied in such a sphere as fantasy, he was immensely practical. The summer before this he had cycled from Malin Head in the North to Mizzen Head in the South. The sights he’d seen along the way he explained in graphic detail. When he went out on his bike, as was his wont each day, he carried materials for mending a puncture not in the carrier as a countryman might, but in a blue khaki bag over his shoulder. In the bag he also kept a bottle of ink, a pen, two notebooks and something to drink. Puffing and blowing hard, so that sometimes he t
ook them into the air on his knees, he brought the girls in turn up and down the beach on the bar of his bike. Then Sara, and next Catherine, would attempt to ride the bike with one leg inserted under the crossbar to reach the far peddle, and so, sideways, they flew across the hard sand. It was considered unwomanly to throw your leg over the bar of the bike. A man’s bike needed trousers. In his trousers it was O’Muichin’s habit to ride each day to some nearby village and take, he said, particulars. He was also an early riser. The first morning of his stay, Maisie Adams came down to find he already had the fire lit from the embers of the night before, a cup of tea made, and yesterday’s papers spread across his knees.
Not that anyone could ever rise before the father of the girls.
It was Jonathan Adams’ habit to be up and out to the garden before anyone, and then he’d wake the girls and his wife out of their sleep to sniff the wild flowers he’d brought them. They’d sway gingerly up from the depths to find a flower, a dog rose, perhaps, on their pillow. Many’s the morning Catherine found her final dream fill with an exquisite sense of another world, the room of her dream would suddenly fill with a vague blue, a delicate mist hanging tentatively out of reach. Then slowly it would move towards her, enveloping the dreamer; she’d swoon and wake to find a primrose pressed to her nostril.
“You haven’t lived,” Jonathan Adams believed, “if you haven’t smelt the primrose.”
The morning after O’Muichin’s arrival it was single sprigs of lilac the women found. Descending in his socks, the teacher met the Sergeant ascending with the clump of lilac in his hand. Adams hung his head to be found about such a sentimental journey so early in the morning.
“Is fior,” said O’Muichin, nodding towards the flower, “nach bhfuil blath nios cumhra na i.”
“Pray?”
“There’s nothing sweeter,” said O’Muichin, “than the lilac.”
For both men that first day had begun generously.
O’Muichin lit the fire, left a cup of tea at the door of the Sergeant’s study, and leafed through various books – Stray Thoughts on Reading by L. H. M. Soulsby, Maisie’s Sea Gardening and Catherine’s The Liverpool Poets in the Penguin Modern Poets series – till the girls came down. When they did not appear he went out to weed in the garden and throw grain to the geese. The girls were slow in coming because they were talking in that languorous manner of people privileged to be alive without knowing it.
Theirs was a world of sensation only.
It was Catherine’s turn to tickle her sister. This always took ages, for Sara was a great pleasure-seeker, and she would make promises way and beyond what she could carry out just for a few extra moments of leaving her body for that other body where the senses raised their perceptions like deer. First she lay on her stomach, then Catherine touched her neck, tiptoed down her spine with her fingertips, flattened her palms at the sudden curve of her sister’s rump, then halted in the curved hollow at the bottom of Sara’s spine. Sara turned over on to her back. “Just a little more,” she said. “You’re very demanding,” said Catherine. Now Catherine, thinking of something far removed from what she was at, traced her sister’s breasts and upper arms. Then she’d consider a woman’s body, knowing where each pleasurable stress lay. With a selfish edge of narcissism, she’d frustrate her sister. Hurrying, she sifted at the edge of places then flitted away, and looking out of the window, with one hand she tipped her sister’s temples lightly while with the other she teased across her thighs, and with both hands, lastly, she felt the roots of the hair on her head.
“That’s enough,” said Catherine. “I’m getting up.”
Sara came on to her elbow. “Could you pass me my socks?” she said, and then, as she pulled them on her beneath the sheets in the bed, she ventured idly: “I met a man raking seaweed into clumps below at low tide. He was very handsome. ‘Are you local?’ I asked him. ‘No, Leitrim,’ he replied. ‘We’re all mad in Leitrim.’ Then he broke into a merciless laugh.”
“Leitrim?” said Catherine. “I doubt that he’s attractive.”
“He is,” Sara said confidently, “in a way.”
“The Leitrim man always gives me the same feeling as the single red bloom of the geranium down in the porch,” replied Catherine. “I can’t bear to look at it without feeling sad and wanting to run away at one and the same time.”
“I like him.”
“You do?”
“Yes,” said Sara.
Catherine looked at her sister, as she often did, with trepidation, because she felt Sara had crossed some invisible line that made them both wholly independent of each other, which in itself, though scaring, was ennobling. Sara led the way, Catherine followed.
“Good morning, ladies,” O’Muichin said. From this out they were to be known as ladies it seemed. When, after breakfast, they sat down at the table with their notebooks and pens as they were accustomed, O’Muichin suggested a walk round the countryside instead. He took with him a bird book and a flower book, but he did not need them, for the girls – long encouraged by their father – recognized everything, recalled spring flowers, autumn flowers, told him in English, and he translated.
The meadowsweet was airgead luadra, the silver rushes. The primrose was bainne bo bleachta, the milk of the milch cow. The daffodil, the flower that hangs its head, lus an chron chinn. The ditches were filled with herb Robert and he became lus coille, flower of the wood, though there was not a tree in sight. And then came the daisy, noinin, little noon or midday.
The girls could not believe the soft nature of this man, with his upturned shoes, consoling eyes and frayed shirt collar, that could give the flowers they knew a different stance in another language. They walked from field to field accounting for the lesser celandine, the purple loosestrife, the purple head of the thistle, the grip of the leaf round the phallic head of the blossoming hemlock, and back again to the cluster of mauve lights from brave herb Robert in a ditch. Some plants he could translate by colour alone, for the Irish had no name for them. Then they passed on to birds: Robin, spideog, a snot or the little perky one; the scald crow, preachan na gearcha, crow of the hens or the chicken crow; londubh, blackbird, the black spout of music. The lady thrush, and the lady blackbird had the same name, he said.
“And what’s that?” asked Sara.
Here O’Muichin hesitated.
“Some words for birds,” he said, “are lost in meaning. If you take the male it’s smollach, and that could be translated as a lighted coal. But if you take the cléirseach that could mean something else.”
“And what’s that?” asked Catherine.
“Oh, that’s a hard one.”
O’Muichin considered his book of birds where the female thrush was drawn in flight, and at rest, in quick dabs of faded watercolour; he looked at her coat of spots and wondered how the ancient Irish had found there what the word described.
“Cunt,” he said. And before they had time to take this in he immediately turned and pointed at a magpie. “Snag breac,” he said quickly. “An snag breac,” he said again while they mulled over the wild consonants and soft vowels of the cléirseach. He spelt out the letters of the snag breac, smiling to himself.
“Meaning the piebald thief,” he explained. They looked at the magpie while they thought of the thrush. “Isn’t that good?” he asked. He went on to the chough, the corncrake, and the peregrine.
“There’s one,” said Catherine. “I don’t suppose you have in Irish – what of the phalarope?”
“I’m afraid I never heard of him.”
“He is,” she said, holding his gaze, “perhaps the opposite of the cléirseach.”
“Indeed?”
“A tiny wader, in fact.”
“Oh,” said their teacher, shyly. “Is that so?”
Across the sky a bank of threatening clouds gathered. A sharp wind, tough as hail, blew in. Within seconds, rain was falling on the islands. The girls took their teacher into a dried-up drain that ran under a dense wind-beaten arch
of shrubbery. With sudden drops of rain tumbling through, they walked stooped for ages along the passage with its gold roof of crystals of rain and sun. Shafts of light struck their faces. O’Muichin was mesmerized. Sara whistled as she walked ahead, looking behind her now and then to make sure that the others were following. When they emerged from the tunnel the sun had given the mountains and sea a quality for which there are no words. The new hallucinatory light that precedes the rainbow covered everything, killing all colours except the simple green that cannot be defined as colour only, but is a state of being that follows on the heels of summer rain.
And, as always in such a light, Catherine, as she walked with the others, felt the uncanny sensation of being in the company of an illusion. She was part of a film being made. Sara’s face loomed and blurred. As for O’Muichin, he became faceless and strange. The two were talking to each other in a familiar way that Catherine could not understand. I’m burning inside, she thought, for someone to tell me how beautiful I am. From the wet grass came the sound of birds like shook dice. As Catherine made a great effort to catch up with the others, she stumbled and her hand inadvertently touched O’Muichin’s bottom, and she withdrew it in shock, not because her touch was accidentally rude, but because she was amazed to find his trousers were so cold.
You would have expected, she told Jack Ferris years later, an Irish teacher’s bum to be warm.
“I’ll put a cup of tea on,” O’Muichin said to Jonathan Adams.
It was seven in the morning. The day outside was sandy-coloured and wet.
“Thank you,” said the old Presbyterian.
He came in from the garden with a clump of yellow gazanias. His hair and face were damp. He placed the flowers very carefully on the sink. Turned and put an outstretched hand upon the table. “Oh,” he said as if remembering something. Then O’Muichin saw that Jonathan Adams had turned wretchedly pale. “Mr Adams!” said O’Muichin. The old man shook his head. Another seizure of pain passed through him. He placed both hands on the table, leaned his head forward and down and stayed there like a man in the starting blocks.
