A Goat's Song

by Dermot Healy

  There was a lane of white sand to the right that led eventually to the dunes. Catherine, her fists gripped tight in the pockets of her coat, walked down the lane about a hundred yards to where the windswept grass ended and the rising furze of the bog began.

  Cold winds from the sea reached her, but there was no sign of Sara. “Sara,” she called suddenly, forgetting all her duplicity. “Sara!” she screamed. With a sick feeling of distress she screamed again. It was no use. Soon it would be pitch black. She ran back along the white sand to the road. Finding tarmacadam under her feet, she turned right, she turned left. She didn’t know where she was. She turned right and keeping the middle distance of the crest of the hill before her and the single light of O’Malley’s to her left, she made for The Dwellings. She rounded Termoncarrach Lough, frightening the lake birds. The high stone wall had a dark human presence. Walking back to Corrloch seemed to take an eternity. The night was filled with the sound of coughing animals, and always, as she ran the last few yards, the impression of someone, stronger and more powerful than herself, gaining on her.

  19

  Oh No, Don’t Stop the Carnival

  A few years later, on St John’s Eve, fires celebrating the summer solstice of a few days before were burning everywhere through the far west. All along the coast as darkness fell piles of tyres, old furniture, barrels of tar were set alight. On Mullet fires were burning and they were answered by fires on Achill, on Nephin, at Benwee Head, Carrowteige, and Sheskin. Flames leapt up into the darkness as the Adams girls drove towards Barnatra.

  Whooshes of sparks rose on every side.

  Across the gate that opened into a field a huge banner announced the Folk Festival. The banner plunged in the wind like a parachute behind a seaplane touching down. A string of bulbs had fallen with a spray of light into a corner of the field.

  The wind was fierce. The marquee billowed. The girls came up the road through lines of parked cars. A few acres of stony land away was the Atlantic. The girls clung to each other’s arms, balancing and laughing against the gusts. The marquee, with sails illuminated, shook like a grounded ship. “The things we do,” shouted Sara. “What?” screamed Catherine. The generator hummed and gave off a stench of dark oil. The stewards, laughing to each other, swung bits of twine with a darning needle at the end to pierce tickets. They drank by turn from a bottle and slagged those they knew.

  Couples suddenly appeared in restless beams of moonlight, then disappeared as suddenly into the shadows. The members of the festival committee went to and fro, watching for the possibility of sparks reaching the tent. They argued about the cost of certain performers over the coming days, made cynical remarks about the chairman, and blamed each other for what might go wrong. Small tents had been pegged into a nearby field by the Fleadh-goers from round the country, and the farmer who owned the field was demanding of the committee that either he be paid a rent or else that they be moved.

  “Them lads are all go-boys,” he complained, “they’ll have my field destroyed.”

  “We’ll see about payment when the event is over,” said the secretary.

  “You have your shite,” replied the farmer.

  The local committee humbled by each new onslaught weaved their way smiling through the strange folk people. Each whip of the canvas made their heads turn; nervously they barked orders to the stewards, fidgeted with the cardboard cashbox on a table inside, where the pound notes were clamped down under a tin of nails. The drivers of the cars shouted at the women as they drove by, but Catherine and Sara took no notice. Their Northern solidarity gave them a snobbish and conspiratorial air. Their high heels covered in mud, the women delicately entered the tent. It was like going into a paper bag where you were surprised to find other people gathered and acting natural. The floor was boarded as on an ancient trawler, and gave at the centre to all sides.

  Jack Ferris, bright-eyed, passed within a few feet of them. He was smoothing down his tossed hair.

  “Hallo,” he said.

  “It’s you,” Catherine said.

  He commenced some further grooming – patting his pockets, shaking his pants, tying a lace.

  “And the girl in the Abbey – is she all right?”

  “Fine, Jack, fine,” said Sara.

  To Catherine he looked a little strange in his flared trousers. To think of her shameful fantasies that had centred round Jack Ferris those few summers ago made her feel weak. “See you later,” she said. He walked over to where the men, like something out of another century, went up and down as the boards gave beneath their feet when weight elsewhere shifted.

  “Do you see him looking at you?” said Lizzie Summers.

  “Who?” asked Sara.

  “Your man – Ferris.”

  “Oh him.”

  Asked Lizzie: “Is it you, Catherine, or Sara or what that he’s after?”

  “You better ask him,” Catherine said.

  “Sure, yon fellow,” surmised Lizzie Summers, as she shook out her coat, “he only has it for to stir his tay.”

  Although it was really a folk festival, the committee had decreed that on the opening night there should be entertainment for the locals. So an old-fashioned country-and-western dance and a céilí had been arranged before the folk groups started. In a white suit a crooner from the fifties sang Walter Glynn’s version of “Where My Caravan Is Resting”, then came a local fiddle band who played too fast to dance to, then a long-retired country-and-western showband from Castlebar who looked into each other’s eyes as they swept through old popular airs. The band played behind low hardboard screens depicting sunsets, palmtrees and blue morning stars. The elderly singer sang with an American accent and wore a shirt with silver tassels. At the announcement of each new song the folk crowd gave a patronizing, exaggerated cheer. Every so often a priest with a low brimmed hat and billowing coat held a draw in aid of Knock Airport. He was greeted by raucous applause. As the dance proceeded he was out between every tune, sometimes a fraction late, so that, with a backward wave of his hand, the band ended the tune before it had rightly begun.

  He saw off crystal vases, cigarettes, a bottle of Black Bush. At one stage he was bartering a tray of Bournville chocolates which he was holding high over his head when someone, it was said, tampered with the generator, one of those fuckers from Dublin it was said, the lights went off and, no way put out, he continued to talk on unseen and unheard while the tent floor buckled as the dancers raced across it. There were aggressive roars of laughter. Shrieks. Screams. The light came back on like the flap of the confessional being suddenly slid back.

  The dancers, who were in their thirties and forties, old couples who had come for the nostalgia of the sixties showband tunes, were in each other’s arms kissing. Men were on their knees. One man’s trousers were down round his shins. The priest shook the chocolates over his head. “Number 242, a red ticket,” he roared down the thunderous microphone. The dance continued. The sixties people in their old-fashioned gear went country. The wind charged through the entrance. The stewards drew heartily on their cigarettes. The chairman of the Parish Committee spoke.

  And though the Adams girls were asked to dance, they refused.

  Sara was wearing a green high-collared blouse, a wide grey skirt and little white high-heels. Catherine was wearing a dowdy, flower-patterned dress that reached her ankles and, as a gesture towards her mother, stout church-going shoes. Her blond hair, tied with a red scarf, was in a ponytail. She had, Jack knew, beautiful legs. The girls had their faces painted. Their nails varnished. Their minds made up. They sat out the céilí band and the crooner. Only when the country-and-western started did they dance, and then out of fun. Instead of taking a partner, they took to the floor in each other’s arms, slighted the men who asked them out and instead aligned themselves at the foot of the stage with those middle-aged women who danced with each other in a maternal, self-conscious way, with plump elbows held high and shy eyes cast down. Slim and athletic, with a noble head, Catherine dan
ced in a slow shuffle with her sister.

  The girls were slumming with the locals.

  The lights came and went. The tent rocked unsteadily. At each request for someone from Mullet a cheer arose from the shepherds of Binghamstown. Women were spun away from each other. A stray terrier came in and swinging round on all fours started barking furiously at the band. An odd roar came from someone stopped outside where the long-bearded youngsters were waiting for the real festival to begin. Cigarettes were flicked away into the darkness. Joints passed through various hands. Fires flared along Broadhaven Bay. The outsiders from the east looked at the fires and wondered what they meant. Not knowing increased their euphoria. The sea stood groin to groin against the land. And there was a feeling that the dance music was issuing from a wireless, where the hand had not quite found the station; it was a music gone back in time; other timeless conversations kept breaking in – arguments, the mock grunts of men wrestling, women screeching; it was something dangerous, something pagan; winds from the sea blew the tunes around, loudspeakers seemed to pick up one instrument only – and all this sound woven brashly together travelled across to where a small herd of cattle watched ears-up over a ditch.

  It reached the old men who stood for a moment outside the houses on the outskirts of Barnatra watching the bonfires the children had lit. It reached a woman making her way home to her daughter’s. I remember those tunes, she thought. It was a small insignificant human sound, carried this way, carried that way. Sometimes not heard at all even if you listened keenly for it.

  The band was playing a Slim Whitman ballad. Then came another air from the past

  And most of all I miss her lips

  A shade of eiderdown

  and then a brace of Beatles tunes. At one end of the floor, near the entrance, the drunken outsiders clamoured, while further up the locals danced sedately. The girls waltzed across the clattering floor, took bold swings, avoided the middle-aged women who were doing the Twist and Huckle-Buck, and, perspiring, waited during the intervals while the young crowd called out for Planxty. A song by Elvis took the sweating ancient-faced singer, who was encouraged by everyone there, to his knees, while even older men than him, on sax and trombone, pretended it wasn’t happening. The different generations roared for more while the stout brass players huddled together and blew wild riffs into a single microphone. Then the guitarist, grey-haired and pot-bellied, turned his back to the dancers and played his solo facing the blustering canvas behind. The air of the tent flickered with static. Jack Ferris danced with all the women who had come by minibus from the peninsula. The girls spied Jack in the arms of a married woman, Annie Burke, whose husband skippered the Inishglora, and then with Josie Malley who was beautiful, and Mary Noone who was tall.

  When Ladies’ Choice was announced a huge cheer of nostalgia and mirth and lust went up.

  Jack moved along behind the throng of single men who comported themselves like labourers at a hiring fair. They merrily pushed each other forward. The ones pushed forward kicked backwards. Jack watched over their heads. He never took his eyes off the Adams girls. He was trying to stifle the beat of his heart against his shirt. In the melee, he slipped a hand into his trousers to straighten his penis against his sweating stomach. The palms of his hands slithered. Then Sara flounced over, all confident, and swung him out onto the floor because Catherine wouldn’t. She plonked her flat groin against him. “You have to be kind to my sister,” she said. The nub of her touched him mischievously, yet she stared unashamedly into his eyes as she danced round to where her sister sat, and much to Catherine’s disguised shame handed him on to her. “You’re a real ladies’ man, aren’t you?” said Catherine. The tips of her breasts glanced off his chest. The brief touch of her shoulder in his hands. Then Catherine returned him to Sara, and so for a number of dances he went backwards and forwards between the two women. “I like Catherine a lot,” he told Sara. She excused herself with a fey curtsy. He smiled weakly to himself, then turned proud and mellow as Catherine slid into his arms. “This dreadful music must be from your time,” she smiled. Her damp forehead dropped onto his shoulder and her left arm encircled his waist. She took the two strands of lace that held the cuffs of her dress and tied her wrists together behind his neck, and so they shuffled in a winding fashion between the two poles that held the tent aloft.

  She undid her cuffs, and slid one hand under his jacket onto his shirt.

  “Where are you now?” he asked.

  “Belfast,” she said.

  Her other hand cooled his as it lay along his thigh. And all the time her eyes never left his eyes. So the three sets passed. Catherine let him go. He stood uncertain in the middle of the floor like a man who has just walked out of a cinema.

  Jack rejoined the men. And the sisters, much giddier now, as if they knew some awful secret about him – had they felt the slender arch of his cock against his stomach? – began dancing with each other again.

  After Ladies’ Choice, things were not the same. The tension among the crowd had dropped. The women had spoken. Those left with no one looked round them in dismay. They gazed in desperation at those who like themselves had been overlooked. Pride ran the gauntlet of more refusals. All sat down to wait on the Planxty concert to begin. Some couples stayed in each other’s arms like people drowning.

  “Oh, dear Jesus,” he whispered.

  And the girls made no attempt to separate during the last few tunes. Indeed they grew happier, and more indifferent. Jack sat out tangos, twists, jives. He watched the Adams girls. Then the dance ended and the young traditionalists gathered across the floor. In the make-shift toilet he stood along with the other older men and could not piss onto the sodden grass where buckets of sawdust had been thrown. “That was a fucking good night,” someone said to him. He marched out into the darkness in a cold sweat, hearing the wind, the quiet lisp of bicycle tyres, the moan of engines, the voices of couples.

  Inside, the new generation were screaming for Planxty. The musicians must have come on because a great roar arose. Over the speakers came the bodhran and the mandolin, the bazooki and the Uilleann pipes. Then Andy Irvine began singing “A Blacksmith Courted Me”.

  The rocking beam of the torch in Catherine’s hand skirted the road and Sara laughed.

  “Catherine,” he shouted.

  “Who’s that?” she said, startled.

  “It’s me, Jack.”

  “How are you going home?”

  “I was going in the minibus.”

  “We can give him a lift home, can’t we?” said Catherine.

  “Oh, of course we can,” said Lizzie Summers.

  “Well, he taught me how to drive,” said Sara. He climbed into the back of the Adams’ car alongside Lizzie and a man. They drove off in silence through the crowds of celebrators making their way up the lane. Lizzie Summers fell across Jack’s knee. Gently he lifted her back up onto her boyfriend’s shoulder. “Thanks awfully,” said Lizzie. “So what are you doing now?” he asked Catherine. “Well, Sara is going to be in a small, low-budget film and I’m working in community theatre and studying at Queens. And you?”

  “Salmon fishing,” said Jack.

  “Will you stop here for a moment?” asked the man. “I have to take a leak.”

  He stood on the edge of the road.

  “We should drive off and leave the fucker there,” said Lizzie, “I don’t know what came over me to go with yon.”

  They watched the man from behind, give a little shake, do a bow and draw his buttocks in. Then he turned, and patted his groin.

  “Why do men do that?” asked Catherine.

  “For pleasure,” said Jack.

  “To see if it’s still there,” shrieked Lizzie. She moved over to let her boyfriend in, and slapped a hand on his knee. “You’re lucky, Fintan,” she said to him, “that I’m here to protect ya. They were going to drive off and leave you.”

  They drove by glowing fires on the peninsula. Outside Belmullet the three got out of the back
of the car into teeming rain, and he was about to make for Annagh Head when Catherine called him. She ran after him. The headlights found her wet cheek. He saw drops of rain glide down her face, stall at the brows, shimmer on her lips, fall from her chin onto her damp gaberdine.

  She smiled at him. In the full beam of the headlights Catherine kissed his cheek.

  “Well, goodnight,” said Jack.

  “Goodnight,” said Catherine, and she stood there in the rain looking after him.

  The rain ceased. He was in a land without a horizon. He went on, he came back. He smoked, he cursed himself under his breath, then gave a long wheeze. He stiffened. He barked and sniffed furiously. His armpits grew hollow. Then he spun on his heels, and when he stopped his mind filled with the interior of the chaotic marquee.

  “Who’s that?” someone shouted out of the shadows. “Who’s that?” the man asked again.

  “Jack Ferris,” Jack whispered.

  “I’m Fintan Carmichael,” the other answered. “I was with you in the car. The bitch Lizzie Summers showed me the door the minute I dropped the hand.” He came closer. “Are you not well?”

  “I’m grand, thanks.”

  “The blondes, they gave you a lesson.”

  “Do you say so?”

  “You have to understand women.” His companion clapped him on the back. “You have to stand up to them. Else they’ll walk all over you.”

  “Is that so.”

  “I know them ladies. The Adamses a’ Corrloch.” Fintan Carmichael continued in a conspiratorial way. “You have to watch the chicks of the blue hen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The father was RUC.”