A Goat's Song

by Dermot Healy

  She touched her eyes and found the lashes wringing wet.

  The birds fluttered and moved a fraction at her approach, then, all of a sudden, she was in the middle of the damp mist, and could see neither before her nor behind.

  21

  At Sea

  When they were about a mile out to sea Catherine began to feel ill. She stood alone at the stern thinking the sea air might restore her, but she only got worse. As the boat plunged beyond Inishglora her perspective danced wildly. A cold sweat streamed down her back. The planks buckled underfoot. She climbed down to the cabin where the men were lying on the bunks.

  “Are you all right?” asked Jack.

  “If you really want to know,” said Catherine, “I don’t feel well.”

  “It’s the same for all of us at the beginning.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  The men smoked in the cramped cabin. Jack introduced her to Hugh. “Hugh is the cook on board,” said Jack.

  “God bless us,” said Thady, “onions in dripping.”

  “I’d prefer if ye did not talk about food,” she asked.

  “I know what you mean,” said Hugh. “I often feel the same way myself when I have to fry mince.”

  “Please,” she said.

  The men drank tea and lemonade, they joked, they slept, waking for a few seconds as the battering gained an extra beat that had not been there the last time. She sat on a bench with her head in her hands. The engine groaned drily, the pistons shook, then the roar tapered off into a low sickening throb.

  “You should lie down.”

  “It’s not what you’d call romantic,” she said.

  She lay on the edge of an upper bunk, very close to falling off, wrapped in a torn sleeping bag and a patchwork blanket covered in fish scales. The smell of oil was everywhere. A few times as the boat lurched Jack nearly jumped up to catch her, but each time she toppled Catherine corrected herself, and cried out: “This is hell!”

  “Is this all you do, lie down here and sleep?” she asked.

  “Till we get there.”

  She turned inward and gradually began to roll towards the edge again. He smoked and watched her.

  Then the skipper shouted down: “Hi Jack! Wake the boys. We’re there.”

  They let the first salmon buoy out, the rope snapped after it and, flicking off rainwater, the net followed. Catherine, a hand curved round a rail, watched from the cabin door. The men stood either side of the unrolling net, with Jack on the lead line and Thady on the light, each with red plastic gloves on, for fear, as Thady explained, “of losing a digit, don’t you know.” If the net snagged they hauled frantically till the lines loosened themselves.

  When they’d dropped the salmon nets, Hugh began frying breakfast. The smell of liver drove her astray. She stayed on deck till they were finished, then they set off again around the island. They tossed out the first turbot net. When Thady threw the buoy Jack stood with the weight in his hands till the rope had run out far enough.

  “Let the fucker go!” shouted Thady.

  The minute Jack let the weight go the rope went under with sufficient speed to take a man overboard. He leapt out of the way of the net flying after it. The two men stood watching the net as it ran through their hands until they came to the rope again, then came the second weight, which Jack held till the last moment to straighten the net. The rope rose out of the sea shedding water. He steadied the weight against the prow. He held it till the full force of the taut bristling rope grabbed him.

  “Will you let the fucker go!” shouted Thady.

  He dropped it into the sea.

  “One of these days you’ll go with it,” said Hugh.

  Finally the end buoy, with its black flag toppling wildly, sloughed overboard to mark the drop. The boat revved forward. They pulled away from the shot, and went beyond Inishglora to haul in the turbot nets that they’d lowered to the floor of the ocean the day before. They stood on the bouncing deck without speaking as they searched for sight of the buoys.

  “It never ends,” said Hugh to Catherine.

  She went below but could not sleep. She stood aft and looked into the heaving blue and felt miserable. Each wave turned her stomach a little more. She was shocked to find that a boat at sea is more cramped than an underground tunnel. Although there was that infinite space around, the deck could be crossed in four paces. The bunks below were cramped together in a cabin that was only a few feet wide. If she stood to starboard she inhaled diesel fumes. If she went below the boat was plunging as the net was winched in.

  The boat wheeled round the buoy. A mist descended. First the net came through the winch where Thady freed it of fish. Behind him the others drew it into two piles, cleaning it as they went of seaweed and gravel. It came up trailing extraordinary vegetation. A dark green stench from the bed of the ocean filled the boat. Strange shellfish crawled across the deck. Oily blossoms fell away. Jack hauled to starboard on the lead line, Hugh to port. At their feet the net, dripping thick fluids, was piled.

  The hauling seemed to go on forever. The turbot, flattened by countless fathoms of seawater, were thrown into boxes. The mist grew dense. Seagulls flew by. The boat slopped in the silence. It seemed they had lost touch with human kind. Then, like a voice from hell, some message crackled across the radio. The silence afterwards was deafening. The brooding skipper leaned out of the window to see where he was. He tacked to port, and they chugged slowly forward. Sometimes through a break in the mist they might see the buoy fluttering away off in the distance, then it would disappear again as the fog closed in around them. The mist moved across the boat in silent wet balls. Catherine climbed onto the foredeck, and tried to hold down the bile in her throat.

  From below, the cheerful voices of the fishermen reached her like voices from another dimension. Their normality made each voice discordant. That they seemed familiar with all this ghostly otherworld alarmed her.

  “Any sign of the buoy?” asked Hugh.

  Hauling steadily, Jack looked out to starboard.

  “Any sign?” Hugh called.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Will you try and stay with me,” Hugh complained.

  A few minutes later they were still hauling, hauling.

  “Anything yet?” asked Hugh.

  Jack did not answer.

  “Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” called Jack.

  “There’s no need to be so fucking short-tempered.”

  “Stop pulling so fucking quickly.”

  Their arms worked furiously in short circles as they jabbed out to grab the wet net. The winch screeched. The hauling seemed to go on forever. Falling forward, falling back on their heels with the momentum of the boat. The nets were now waist-high.

  “There must be some sign of her now.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Look again, will you.”

  Jack stopped pulling and caught his breath. He straightened. He glanced at Catherine. Then he looked out to sea. The winch kept turning. The net kept coming in. A bird screamed overhead. They were alone in a small clearing in the mist. He searched the sea ahead.

  “I can see no sign of the United Ireland,” said Jack.

  “Oh but you are some bollacks,” said Hugh.

  Not long after that they pulled the last stretch of net on board. The rope, teeming with wet, came skipping across the water. The buoy came in. Immediately the men sat on the heaped nets with their heads lowered, and smoked. The skipper put the kettle on. He came out to check the loads of fish in the boxes. “Not bad,” he said. He drove the gear to forward. The boat headed back over the choppy sea to the salmon grounds.

  Over the rail Catherine vomited profusely. Then, when the sea grew heavier, they tied a rope to her so that she would not fall overboard. Around her the men cleaned the insides of the fish. Out of the skate poured green fluid that smelt dank and heavy like fresh manure.

  “How much longer?” she asked sadly.

  “
I told you,” said Jack, “once we go out we can’t go in.”

  “This is the most awful day of my life,” she whispered.

  “I told you.”

  “Don’t keep saying that,” complained Catherine. “I would dearly love to do away with myself.”

  “Keep looking at the horizon, Missus,” advised Thady. “Your brain is receiving the wrong signal, don’t you know. Your poor brain thinks you’ve eaten something wrong. You know and I know you haven’t. But your brain does not know that. It thinks you’re sick. But you see, you’re not sick.”

  “I am sick.”

  “No, you’re not,” said Thady, “your brain only thinks that. The thing to do is to dispute this with your brain. Just look at the horizon. Just keep looking at the horizon. That’s the girl.”

  “Oh God.”

  Catherine looked at the horizon. While the men worked among the boxes of floundering fish she held the rope that tied her to a metal spar on the foredeck, and looked at the horizon.

  They dropped Catherine and the catch off at Blacksod. Jack walked her up the pier. She stood shivering and wet and pale. She had his yellow oilskin jacket on and old woollen gloves belonging to Thady.

  “I’m sorry if I shamed you.”

  “Here,” he said, “take these with you,” and he handed her a plastic bag of fish.

  “What are these?”

  “They’re monkfish.”

  “Look,” she said, “at their little pudding hands joined over their wobbly breasts. In prayer, I suppose.”

  “Hence their name.”

  She looked at him.

  “I have to go back out now.”

  “I don’t believe it. Right away?”

  “The salmon are running.”

  “You mean you’re going to spend all night out there?”

  “Aye. If the weather holds. And the next day maybe.”

  She dropped the bag of fish and took his two hands in hers.

  “Call and see me when you get ashore.”

  “I will.”

  She kissed him.

  “I must smell dreadful.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Oh dear,” said Catherine, kissing him again, “I thought it might come to this.”

  He went to the end of the pier, waved and loosed the final rope. As he stepped on, the boat was already moving.

  From her bed she heard someone passing over the gravel. She waited but no knock came. Then she thought, I’ve let myself down. Someone went over the gravel again, and even when she knew it made no sense, she listened on.

  If the gate stirred in the wind her heart flitted. If the wind blew a can down the road she listened for the silence that would come and bear his step.

  In her mind she saw the wall that crept round the yard at the back of Thady’s house. She saw the turf in the lean-to. The walls stuffed with old green Guinness bottles. The ass’s cock with teats. The ass’s teeth on the top of the wall. Then, all the doors of the house blew open. She shot bolt upright in the bed, and ran downstairs.

  But there was no one there.

  She fell asleep listening to the rain beating warmly on the galvanize sheds out the back. It was her first time in the house in Corrloch alone, and she found it disturbing. The roar of the waves on the curved beach reached the dwellings with the loud moan of trucks going uphill. Catherine afterwards had a dream in which her mother entered this long room and sat at the edge of a small bed – oh, a long distance away from Catherine. Her mother did not look like her real mother, but inside she was still the same. Then her mother lifted up a saucer, tilted her head sideways and rested her cheek in the groove of the dish. At that moment, Catherine had a great longing to be held. She entered a state of pure physical enchantment which was so intense it woke her.

  The rain was slipping off the sill.

  It was drumming from the gutters into the rain barrel at the side of the house. The door of the house across the street was open, smoke spun to the southwest and Joe Love was seated at the open door, his hands in his lap, one foot dreaming. Chickens were picking through the gravel in front of him. Then it seemed his house lifted off the ground just about one inch. The impression was of gravity slowly losing its hold. Between the walls of the house and the ground there was now this perfect inch of empty space. There was an inch beneath every leg of his tilted chair. Only the chickens remained earthbound. Catherine made her way laboriously back to bed, thinking, What was that dream that I could feel like this?

  Later she watched a thrush with richly speckled breast go shopping in the front garden. A girl in bright blue trousers, swinging a bag, came down the gravel road. Catherine accepted her stare, she hers, they merged. She thought, it’s two days now. He’s got to call. But the days dragged on to three, then four, and still Jack Ferris did not come.

  He’s out to destroy me, she thought.

  She thought of getting the next bus away from the peninsula, of returning to Belfast. And yet she did not move. The house was growing strange. She sat with her back to the window that looked out on the road. Her stomach filled with cramps. With her back to the window she’d hear someone approach, but she must not turn. She’d urge them on, whoever they were, to the door. And then there would be that wonderful moment of hesitation by the gate. The person stopping. She must not turn for fear of having to acknowledge her despair. She’d entice him further on. It was dangerous. Her heart pounded. Only to hear the step pass. And as it would pass then she would turn to see it had been someone else, and begin again.

  I would not keep it up for so long, she thought, if someone was waiting for me.

  This waiting, it seemed, went on for ever. So that when the person hesitated and the gate opened around six one evening she had already allowed five figures to pass. The steps go on. The despair set in. I’ve lost him. When Jack knocked on the door she felt she had only imagined it. This human contact was beyond her. It was happening in the past. It could not be reconciled. When the knock was repeated she had to measure each step to the door. The blood filtered from the backs of her hands. And, even when she opened it, his familiar face was like a hallucination. Nor did she know whom he meant when he looked in at her out of the dark and said: “Hallo, Catherine.”

  Then, dizzy, she led him in, but, strangely enough, hesitated a moment before she closed the door, as if she were expecting some other, as if he had brought someone else along with him.

  When the salmon season ended he took her home to Kilty. In a plastic bag he had two large salmon as a gift for his parents. They were on the road for hours hitching from the treeless bogs of the west of Mayo to the watery small fields of North Leitrim. They passed through a storm on the long sounding-board below Ben Bulben. Stood out of the rain under a birch on the road from Buckode to Rossinver. The smell of silage steamed through the bushes.

  “I’m sure your parents will banish me,” she said.

  “Not at all,” said Jack. “In fact they’re separated – not that they would call it that. He sleeps in the surgery across the street, but comes over home for his dinner.”

  “That’s extraordinarily civilized.”

  When they got to Jack’s village she was too nervous to head for Ferris’ straight away so they went into a pub for hot whiskeys. Soaked and dishevelled they sat in the spirit grocers before colourful biscuit tins, bread in cellophane, bottles of Bull’s Blood wine, mail bags, gardening spades and bags of fertilizer seed. Girls, under tweed coats, in dresses of light mustard or yellow and shorn at the calf, passed through to the dark lounge behind. Each called out to Jack.

  “I didn’t know,” said Catherine, “that you were so popular.”

  “It’s a small place.”

  “I took you to be a shy person.”

  “Oh, but I am,” he laughed.

  A small man, poor-featured, manic-eyed, of weak gait, welcomed Jack home with a thump on the shoulder.

  “Well, you’re the lad,” he said, giving Catherine a long unabashed survey.

&nbs
p; “This is Catherine,” Jack said, introducing her to the woman behind the bar.

  “I’m delighted to meet you,” she said, dropping Catherine’s hand. “Did I meet you before?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “Ah, I must be mistaking you for someone else,” she said slyly.

  “We have salmon here in a bag for the doctor,” Jack said for no good reason.

  “You were always a good thoughtful fellow,” said the bar-woman, and then she added with a lascivious smile, “and he was a good court too.”

  “I see,” said Catherine icily.

  “You’ll give her the wrong impression, Mary.”

  “He doesn’t like to hear it, you know. But you see he was always a man for the women.”

  “Is that so?”

  “That’s right,” the little man chipped in, “and I haven’t the brains to go mad.”

  “Oh, fair play,” laughed Jack.

  “And I was foolish enough,” whispered Catherine, “to think that you were an innocent.”

  “You made a bad mistake there.”

  “How many of these women have you been with?”

  “A few.”

  “It’s sordid. And do they always talk like this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well I don’t find it amusing. It’s more sordid than amusing.”

  “You’d be better off keeping out of the courts,” interrupted the man, “if you can. The courts are cat. I had to fight through the courts with a neighbour of mine to retain a right-of-way.” He moved a salt cellar into the middle of the bar counter. “Do you see that? Let’s say that’s my place.” He shifted an ashtray. “That’s the field.” A bottle of stout was the neighbour’s house and his empty glass was the German’s. He flicked a penny on the counter, then moved it into position. “And that’s the right-of-way. Now.” He reviewed the forces he had collected. Took a long draught from his glass of stout. “I wanted the right-of-way to go down here,” he said, lifting the bottle of stout, “as it always used to do till certain parties put their nose in.”