That Old Country Music

by Kevin Barry

  One night in January I had walked out of the Sligo house, crossed the reed fields, walked the greasy planks of the jetty and attempted to lower myself into the lake. It was the sheer iciness of the black water that forced me back. But then I suppose January is a tough month for everyone. Though maybe not to the extent that they try to fucking top themselves. Coming from a small family, I had not much support to summon by phone call, and I had consciously pulled away from my old friends. All of them. But now, in Donegal, in the clear light of summer, I was somehow making amends with myself. I let the music play out late and low on Lyric FM. I had the sense that I was deflating the last of my old self, slow breath by slow breath.

  * * *

  The solicitors were on again. There were more forms to be signed. I said I’d drive down but this was not necessary—one of their team would be near Glenties on the Friday for the conveyancing of a farm and the forms could be dropped in to me.

  It was a youngish solicitor who came by the cottage. She was attractive, quite dark, and with a Donegal accent like running velvet. She stood with me by the doorway, where the whitethorn gave shade and dangled its occult strands.

  “And you’ll not put it on the market?” she said.

  “I might stay a while,” I said.

  She looked towards the kingdom ground of the Bluestacks across the way.

  “There is something about this place,” she said.

  “Have you a long run back?” I said.

  And yes, I told her, it was beautiful country, and the few people I’d met had seemed sweet-natured to me, and I was struck by the great produce available these days in the town markets nearby.

  “Fantastic local cheeses,” I said. “I could, ah…I could do you up a sandwich for the road?”

  “Ah now,” she said.

  “I’ve a blue cheese from Ardara you’d weep for,” I said.

  “A blue?” she said.

  “Dairy is my heroin,” she said.

  “I’ll make it,” I said. “Sure you can eat it here if you like.”

  I made for the kitchen before she could protest.

  “And I must put a match to that fire,” I said. “It gets cool enough still in the evenings.”

  When I served her the sandwich it was with an air of priestly decorum, and I said—

  “You wouldn’t take a drop of wine with that?”

  A laugh rippled mischievously at the back of her slender throat.

  “I suppose it is a Friday,” she said.

  We were in the bed inside an hour, and we horsed into each other then for the rest of the afternoon.

  It was fabulous.

  * * *

  A second meeting was arranged. We had dinner in the town. A disaster. Our talk oozed out over the chowder with all the vitality of wet cement. As she gnawed at her steak, I saw that her teeth were a little crooked. There had already been a difficult moment when she ordered it well-done and I asked if she had a fear of blood, and it was possible that I had a haughty or even a sniggering tone. Away from Aldo’s cottage, the level of my suavity was again in terrible deficit. There was no question of a third time out—the poor girl practically hurdled the waiter as she ran from the place. Maybe it had not been the best idea to get into my suicide attempt over the coffee.

  * * *

  I found the ideal thing as the summer aged was to keep myself close to the cottage. But even then I wasn’t safe from the intruding world. An Italian lady in hiker’s gear called by one evening looking for directions and a refill of her water bottle. She nearly pushed the door in on top of me. I hadn’t the tap running when she had her boots off by the fireplace and was massaging her toes, with her head lolling dangerously. There was no shifting her from the place. After a good hour, I stood up and outright asked her to leave and she rose up herself, flung me against the antique dresser and bit my chin. And sadly I succumbed to it all, again, on the floor, in front of the fireplace, and it went on (or maybe just seemed to) for fucking hours—shamefully, I had to fake a climax to put a stop to it.

  Then before dawn she took me again.

  * * *

  The writing was going tremendously. I was due to deliver my third novel. The central philosophy underpinning all of my work to date was that places exerted their own feelings—nonsense, of course, half-thought-out old guff that sounded okay at literary events but now, here in Aldo’s cottage, there was incontrovertible evidence that it was the case. In this place I was calm, lucid, settled in my skin, and apparently ravishing. Elsewhere I was, as ever, a bag of spanners.

  I packed up most of Aldo’s old clothes for the charity shop in Glenties. I kept a tweed jacket, a few ties, the cap, some excellent brogues—we were a close enough match, size-wise: long, simian arms, short legs, no arses. I tried to breathe and settle. I bought little books that named the trees and the flowers of the vicinity. I drove out to Narin and Portnoo and swam in the cold seawater. My prose slowed down and took on a more sombre note; the third novel was apparently going to be all about family and landscape.

  * * *

  But as the summer aged, sleep became troublesome. I began to turn in the bed on the twist of strange groans I had never heard before. Had more been passed on from my uncle than I’d hoped for? Dark information rushed down the channels of the blood.

  I found myself waking in deep unease and leaving the cottage in the middle of the night and walking the moonlit roads in the tweed jacket and cap and talking to myself in Aldo’s scratchy voice and coarse tone. I was trying to outpace myself, in Aldo’s stride, but sometimes, on those nights, I found that I was gaining again.

  This was the other thing the work was going to be about—that there is no stepping away from the shadow of your past.

  * * *

  To face myself I would have to leave him go. I would have to move on again. I sold my car to a widowed lady from Portnoo. I had to physically restrain her from me when I was handing over the deeds under the whitethorn. I put the cottage on the market. I bought a small van and loaded it—I took the antique bedstead, the flagstones I had managed to pry loose, the fireplace surround, the crockery, anything that wasn’t nailed down, and I aimed for Francis Street in Dublin and the antique places there.

  There was no guilt at all. I knew well that I was a maggot, and that in my own unreliable ways I was precisely in the line of Aldo’s stock, my reckless green-eyed uncle who had broken the hearts of nuns and blind girls, had stabbed friends in the shoulders if he missed their backs, had propositioned my mother in the scullery of an Easter Sunday morning, and who once had seen the lights of Moose Jaw burning across the Saskatchewan plain.

  SAINT CATHERINE OF THE FIELDS

  The old singers were all going. One by one they were vanishing from the map of the west. You could hear remnants of the music still but just faintly now from the lips of ancient women and men. I was trying to collect the songs that were as yet unrecorded before their moments had irretrievably passed. My research was in sean-nós—the “old style,” in Irish—the unaccompanied folk singing that is plaintive, sometimes harsh, with often a lovelorn quality, and with narrative always. These were the song-stories that were usually passed down by means of the recital alone. One night in the summer, at a pub in the Inagh Valley in Connemara, I was told about a man called Jackson. He was a singer in south County Sligo and reputed to be a great collector. It was said that he had songs from deep in the nineteenth century even, songs that nobody else had now. My blood at once quickened but I could get nothing about this Jackson beyond his name and broad vicinity—the man who told me about him was really quite drunk.

  Back home, however, an online search quickly offered a lead. In a university sean-nós vault, I found a song recorded in relatively recent times by a Jackson in County Sligo. It was titled “Amhrán Keash Corran” and sung by Timothy Jackson. The recording was from the late 1990s and he sounded old enough even by
that stage. The song was nothing special in itself—a routine panegyric to place—but there was something in his voice that snagged me. He was a singer who would not relent. Google Maps reminded me that Keash Corran, or the Hill of Keash, rises in the Bricklieve Mountains, the rolling uplands that run west from Lough Arrow. I already knew the area somewhat from my endless criss-crossing of the provinces—it always had seemed to me quiet, haunted ground. A place of lakes that lay in greyness to answer their skies. A lonesome and promising territory, I thought.

  * * *

  On a free weekend in October, I drove out west from the city. The usual loosening occurred as I crossed the Shannon river. It’s hard to describe it except as a feeling of openness that descends on me, a kind of receptivity. It’s something I never experience in Dublin, as if certain signals are blocked to me there.

  There wasn’t a soul on the road in the village of Keash. In the early afternoon, its only pub, the Fox’s Den, was shuttered, but a sign in the window advertised a session of traditional music for that same Saturday night. I checked into a B&B nearby. I tried to sleep for a while but my mind ran and I could not sleep. I went out to the foothills of the Bricklieves and walked the last of the day away. The hills displayed with arrogance the riches of autumn and glowed, and I walked in a state of almost blissful sadness. There had been an intense romance that lasted the first half of the year but it no longer held—she went back to her wife. At my age—I had long since cleared the vault of fifty—it was not unreasonable to assume that this might have been my last great love. But still my pain had that shimmer of bliss at its edges—I had gone to the end of passion with someone, once more, and I knew that the achievement was, as it always is, a quiet miracle.

  * * *

  The music that night at the Fox’s Den was finely played but familiar. I knew almost all of it. I drank but calmly enough. During a break in the session, I quietly cornered the box player at the bar, and I asked him did he know of an old fella called Timothy Jackson, a singer from the south county.

  Ah God love us, he said. Sure poor Tim isn’t great in himself at this stage.

  * * *

  I had nearly missed him. He was in a nursing home on the outskirts of Boyle, ten miles south from Keash. He was ninety-six and fading quick. I was his only visitor that bright October Sunday. Whoever was shaving the poor devil had their mind on other things. His skin hung roughly in folds like onion paper and his brittle jaw swung loose on the hinge. He no more than vacantly smiled in my direction but I talked away to him anyway. I told him of my interests and academic studies and of my great love for the music. Nothing came back from Jackson but the gurning of his dark, silent maw. Passing by on her rounds, the duty nurse was sympathetic, and she said to wait it out for a while—there were spurts of talk and life from the old man still. So I spoke to him some more. I said I was especially interested in songs native to his district and he seemed to become more animated at this, briefly, but he fell back again into the recesses of himself. By now the light was thickening in the window and I was about to give up on it and head back on the road to Dublin.

  It was then that he started quietly to sing.

  * * *

  Back in the city, in a fever of excitement, I broke off from the work that should have been occupying me and I brought the Tim Jackson recording onto the desk. Over the week that followed, I transcribed, with more than the usual difficulty, the twelve and a half minutes of the song that he had sung at the slow fading of Sunday afternoon, and that I had caught on my phone. It was delivered in an antique Connacht Irish and by its diction and phrasing I at once felt comfortable that it was pre-twentieth-century. It was hard to believe I had never come across the song before. It should have been a famously dark standard. It presented a very involved narrative and a most troubling story. All of human cruelty was contained within it but something, too, I thought, of what love means. In tone it was truly a one-off. The verses were charged with a kind of erotic mania that resonated all too sharply with my own contemporary funk. Its characters were deformed by desire, and thus the song blew familiar notes through the slutty arcades of my middle-aged brain. It was about lust, betrayal, sexual jealousy—it was meat and drink to me. It informed me that there had been others before as deranged by matters of the heart and loins as I was now.

  This was a tremendous relief and consolation.

  * * *

  There were forty-two verses to the thing. I suppose the nights were long enough back then and wanted filling. I will try now to give the story of the song as plainly as I can.

  The transcription in its first lines told that her name was Catherine Ryan, and that she was “álainn agus beag agus cothrom,” and so she settled into my view as a small, attractive, blonde woman. She was born in low circumstances in the country of the Bricklieves. She knew its climbing paths as a fox knew them. She knew the sweet airs of the mountain fields. It was a great pain for her to leave the place. She left it when she was not much more than a girl. She went to the north of England and worked for years in a factory there. She married a man from the County Leitrim. He was a tallish rake and of merriment fond. They were both of them singers—“amhránaithe”—and they sang the stars into the night above the slate roofs of Lancashire. They took to living by the night and became creatures of it. Their voices lifted and bounced from the tiles and brass of the heaving pubs. The nights turned them to a devilish kind of fun. A rogue pair, they fed off each other’s mischief, and they were not long for the factory life. They were put out of their house. They were soon on the boat home to Ireland again.

  * * *

  As the song opened in this way, its verses felt so carefully textured and manipulated that I suspected a literary hand at work under the hood. The song achieved smooth temporal shifts but not blithely, for something of the story’s passing scene was always given. The merest, glancing line gave somehow the sombre bricks and industrial smoke of England’s Victorian north, and those brassy old pubs loomed above the verse, like lanterns in the dark of the long-lost singing nights. On the return to her home place, the eerie greys and solemn greens of mountain light came through, and the refraction of lakelight, too, a haze of mysterious expectation drawn from landscape and seeping into the story as she settled again into the world of the Bricklieves.

  Quickly, on her return, she met the herdsman.

  * * *

  Landless, without prospect of marriage or advance, he kept a suckler herd for a retired farmer up on the Bricklieves. Born to nearby Culfadda, he lived alone in the hills but for the cattle. He was a youngish man still and possessed of some innocence. He had never moved beyond the small circles of his world—the mountain, the cows, the occasional excitement of the mart and fair day. She met him on a fair day in the town of Ballymote. His natural shyness got past itself at the gaiety of her bright talk. She made him drunk with her talk. Her voice was musical, her eyes sharp and blue. She began from that day forth to climb the hill and call on the herdsman. She brought him fresh bread and news from below. The Leitrim rake was indifferent, it seemed, about his wife’s visits to an unmarried man. After a short while—after the measure of a single moon, the verse tells us—the visits began to increase in frequency. Soon enough, the song suggests, she had the little boots worn out on herself she was up and down that hill so often. The prying eyes and minds of the locality were, of course, alerted to the visits. It was said that the duration of the visits increased—the locality quickly had a clock on the errant pair. The aching music of love was to be heard now across the hill, and the hill was not used to it. Leitrim was fully aware of the situation, a verse implies, and he was not at all put out by the cuckoldry. It became a great scandal and shame of the place but it was so scandalous, so beyond the realm of decency at that time, it was as if there was no language for it, and nothing was said—the vicinity of the Bricklieve mountains found itself in a condition of wordless outrage.