That Old Country Music

by Kevin Barry

  He gave her his life. He gave her the routines and tiny errands of it. The basic skills that were needed for the making of Christmas ornaments, and the ways of the wheedling at the car boot sales, and he taught her that always a distance should be maintained, that there need be no others. He taught her the rituals of the year in this damp and temperate place. She grew to young womanhood in the hatchlight of the woods and its sudden clearances. After her first menstrual cycle, a second trailer was bought and placed beside his. He kept her by a native canniness from the prying of officialdom. As time passed they would go for days and weeks often without speaking to each other—there wasn’t the need for it. She lived long and calmly, and calmly even went the moment of his eclipsing, when she became and replaced him, and laid her fingertips on his eyelids to close them, and she took on the forces of the place, as he had granted them to her, and she could vanish at will into the dark cool recesses of the woods.

  * * *

  There were times of great change beyond the woods, but it did not matter, and the noises of the towns sometimes grew frantic—it did not matter; she read her books—and there were times of mobbed voices and great migrations—it did not matter—and there was the time of the fires across the lakes—it did not matter—and the gaseous blue of their after-glare, but all of it soon faded again and passed, and did not matter.

  * * *

  Even yet the woodland each year stretches out and grows, like the shadow of a disease spreading, and soon the century will turn again, and her trailer’s flue will for just a little while longer twist its penlines of ash smoke through the hatching of the trees, and when she speaks to herself, on these final days, it is in the accent of the place, of the Ox Mountains. If there is a sadness it is that her brothers have long since disappeared—first their faces went, then their voices—and she can recall them now only as an aggregate—the four black buttony heads, bopping, as playful as a sack of pups, and as vulnerable—but in truth she does not think of them that often.

  EXTREMADURA (UNTIL NIGHT FALLS)

  The old dog is tied by a length of rope to a chain-link fence. Its hackles comb up a silent growl as I approach through the edges of the small white town and its eyes burn a high yellow like witch hazel oddly vivid in such a skinny and unkempt old dog. A dog that has known some weather, I’d say. There are no people anywhere to be seen—I am in the last slow mile after dusk and my calves are singing. There is a café up ahead but it is shuttered and dark. I have walked for many hours and miles and in fact for almost fifteen years now. The dog eases into itself again as I come nearer and its flanks relax to this softer breathing and I crouch on my own hind legs by its side to converse for a while among the lights of our eyes.

  It’s as if I’ve known you for a long time, she says.

  But when I lay my hand to her there is a shiver of nerves again as if she has known the cruelties, too. The town is not entirely quiet. Somewhere behind shutters there is the sound of a soccer game on the radio or TV. I used to be afraid of the dogs but they got used to me. Ever the more so as I walk I take on the colours and notes of the places through which I walk and I am no longer a surprise to these places. My once reddish hair has turned a kind of old-man’s green tinge with the years and this is more of it. What the ramifications have been for my stomach you’re as well not to know. I have very little of the language, even after all this time, but the solution to this is straightforward—I don’t talk to people. This arrangement I have found satisfactory enough, as does the rest of humanity, apparently, or what’s to be met of it in the clear blue mornings, in the endless afternoons.

  We are coming out of a very cold winter in Extremadura, which is a place of witches, or at least of stories about witches. To be passing the nights, I suppose.

  The dog has a good part of an Alsatian in her and random bits of mutt and sheepdog and wolf probably and she tells me of a thin life and a harsh one in this cold-hearted, in this love-starved town.

  Go on? I says.

  The lamps above us catch and buzz for a moment as their circuits warm and also to mark the sombre hour there is the hollow doom of the church bells—they lay it on heavily enough around these places still.

  Footsteps, now, as the bells fade out to echoes, and there is a girl of about sixteen years old and she does not see me at all but mouths the words of a popular song, a song that is current, I believe it is a Gaga, I know it well enough myself from the cafés and the concourses—all the years I have doled out in that same old (it seems to me) estación de autobuses that exists at the edge of all these towns; I use them not for the buses but for sleeping—and she moves swaying down the road in a cloud of distraction (if sleep is what you could call it!) and she hums as she goes and she is not a pretty girl exactly but neither plain and what she has in truth is a very beautiful carriage—buenas tardes?

  She turns in surprise over her shoulder but there is not a glimmer, really, she just blinks and moves on, and the dog simpers and stretches; now there is the chug of a moto as it troubles its lungs to mount a rise in the road and a shutter is pulled inwards on a hard sharp creak and the sound of the soccer game loudens; all across the silver hills in the east the cold spring night lovelessly descends. February is an awful fucking month just about everywhere. The waft of sweet paprika and burnt garlic from a kitchen somewhere. Still there is no life at the café. Whatever is going on with that place. Far away in the north my very old parents must be waiting for me or for word of me, at least; they are waiting for me still at the bottom of the dripping boreen framed by the witchy haw and the whitethorn. It’s what keeps them going, I’d say.

  I don’t know what people take me for as I pass along the edges of the roads. What money I have is by now so comically eked out and in such tiny dribs that my clothes are not good at all and as certain as the weeping callouses on the balls of my feet is the need for new boots or a pair of good trainers. I sleep generally where I fall. In doorways sometimes, or if the weather’s foul in the cheapest hostels run always by spidery old women in black, or in the bus concourses, under the benches, or in the lee of buildings, or on the black sand beaches in the south if the winter is especially long and hard and I’ve took a turn down the road for myself. At one time southerned was a very common word and southerning a practice. For the better of the lungs and so forth. Sometimes I’m not sure what century I’ve mistaken this one for and I wonder would I be better off elsewhere and in other times. Sometimes I feel as if my engines are powered on nothing at all but the light of the pale stars that will emerge above us now. I can get by on almost nothing and it is conceivable that I might become very, very old myself, and as spidery. The summers don’t present much of a problem. You can always find cool places.

  The moto comes into the line of our vision, its engine turns off for the decline of the road, and it coasts, and a teenage boy steers and parks it beneath a tree across the way from me. He steps off and looks over and nods and lights a cigarette and he looks down along the road after the singing girl and she senses his glance and turns a look back to him—her thick black hair moves—and their eyes catch for a moment but as quickly she turns from him and is gone; an old man appears as though from the dust and sits on a half-collapsed bench by a white wall that it seems clear to me was at one time bullet-riddled. Now we all watch each other closely and the sense of this is companionable enough. A heavy-set middle-aged man appears in just a flimsy yellow t-shirt that reads Telefonica Movistar—suddenly it’s all go—and he crosses the road to the boy with the moto—he mustn’t feel the cold—and he talks to him and they look down calmly together at the workings of the bike, each of them with their hands on their hips and their cigarettes at a loose dangle from their mouths, and they squint through the smoke at the little moto and its failing organs and the man reaches for it, turns the key, revs it, listens with his head inclined at an expert’s careful angle, and lets it die again and shakes his head. Not long for the road by the loo
ks of things.

  I crouch on my hind legs with the dog whose snout rests in the curve of my shoulder now and she whispers to me that the girl is named Mercedes and is wanted by not a few of the young louts around this place with big rough hands on them—these are country people—and she has already in fact given it to one or two of them. On Saturdays. The clocks must have stopped for them. But awful to be sixteen or eighteen and already your finest hour has gambolled past like a grinning lamb and your moto is fucked also.

  Now the sky makes a lurid note of the day’s ending—there are hot flushes of pink and vermilion that would shame a cardinal. The chain-link fence encases nothing but a crooked rectangle of dirt and dead tyres and stones—old chicken ground maybe—and it has an air of trapped misery.

  And more than that you’re as well not to know, the dog says.

  Dogs, I find, are much the same everywhere. Much of a muchness, as my father would say. They know everything about us and love us all the same. My father when he wanted the sound of the television up or down he would say highern it or lowern it. One time in Ronda I nearly fucked myself into the gorge there altogether. A thousand-foot fall would have settled the question decisively. But I thought that might be a bit loud. I am not by nature a man who has that kind of show in him. No extravagances.

  The old man calls across to the pair by the moto. It is a weak scratchy call like an injured bird would make. The pair by the moto ignore him utterly. Another shutter opens. A TV bleats a game show’s jingle. The sky pales again as quickly as it coloured. As if somebody has had a Jesuitical word. That ours beneath this vaulted roof might be an austere church. There was a time when I tried to fill the sky with words. Morning and fucking night I was at it. In my innocence, or arrogance—the idea that I might succeed. But I walked out of that life and entered this one.

  The teenage boy kicks the back wheel of the fucked moto; the middle-aged man in the t-shirt laughs to make his belly rise and fall. A hunting bird moves across the acres of the sky in the last thin light of day and a breeze comes up the road with quick news—a tree shakes out its bare branches and moves. There is a twist of rancid olive oil on the air over the odour of stale dog. I’m sorry but there is no pretty way to say it. I wonder if I was to make off with you altogether? I could slip this rope from you as easy as anything.

  I’d love to go, she says, and yet I’d not go. Do you know that kind of way?

  Oh but I do. I’d love to go home again but I will not go.

  Imagine? Coming up the boreen in County Roscommon with my tale of the lost years and my rucksack of woes and the little gaunt tragic sunburnt face on me? Wouldn’t they love to see it coming? I do believe they’re back there still—I believe they’re alive and that I’d know somehow if they weren’t.

  I stepped onto a train that night in Madrid and out of my life.

  Love?

  Don’t mention it.

  They must whisper their love to Mercedes as night falls. A hand cupped neatly to the shape of her groin. The question mark of it. The old man gets up from the bench and walks like a clockwork scarecrow by the side of the road. I stand again to stretch out my bones. If I looked hard enough, I’d find a café open someplace among these white-walled streets and hidden turns—I could have coffee with hot milk. But I have nearly had my fill of the cafés. There is only so much of that business you can take. And there is the danger always of the cerveza and the brandy. There are only so many times you can climb over that wall.

  I rise onto the tips of my toes and look along the darkening sky and road and here she comes again, Mercedes, and still she jaws vaguely on her song—buenas tardes?

  But again she ignores me and it is as if she cannot see me even. She carries beneath her arm a carton of table wine—tinto is one of the words I have, and never too far from the tip of my tongue—and a jar of Nutella and in a blue plastic bag a frozen octopus. This will mean a grocer open down the road someplace with a stick of bread for me. Tentacles and spindles and bulbous sacs—I need to dig into myself harder lately for the words of things.

  The dog is up beside me and she sniffs at the air after Mercedes and the evening falls away from us quickly. I’ll need to decide soon where to lie down tonight. The animal must choose its lair. The first stars burn coldly on the plain and I am so many miles from home.

  I reach out for you a last time. Your warm skinny flank and the way that you sigh and move closer to me just once more just this one last time. I slip a finger under the rough collar of rope and work to loosen it and you settle in this moment that much closer to me.

  A moto runs its troubled lungs; the young girl’s step recedes; the old man’s falters.

  The man in the yellow t-shirt passes along and he says hello to the dog and he looks right through me. This is no place for me tonight, I decide—I would rather not their shelter. I’ll move on again and maybe tonight I’ll keep moving all the way through until the sunlight wakes the yellow of the fields of rapeseed and in truth I am still drinking some of the time because I have not yet drank her all the way out of my mind and I still have this broken heart.

  THAT OLD COUNTRY MUSIC

  Hannah Cryan waited in the Transit van up in the Curlews. Setanta Bromell had parked so that the van was secreted in the shade of the Forestry pines and could not easily be seen from the road. He had taken the dirtbike from the back of the van then and headed down to Castlebaldwin pissing smoke. His morning’s ambition was to rob the petrol station there with a claw hammer. Setanta was her fiancé of these recent times and, despite it all, the word still rolled glamorously to her lips.

  It was the second Monday of May. She was a little more than four months pregnant. The whitethorn blossom was decked over the high fields as if for the staging of a witch’s wedding. Already the morning was humid and warm, and snaps of wind cut from the hillsides and sent the blossom everywhere in vague, drifting clouds. Even with the windows shut, her eyes streamed, and she could feel sore pulses in her throat like slow, angry worms. Setanta was thirty-two years old to her seventeen and it was not long at all since he had been her mother’s fiancé.

  That’s the way it goes sometimes with close-knit families, he said.

  Don’t even fucken joke about it, she said.

  Setanta’s plan—if it could be held up to the light as such—was to get into the petrol station just after it opened, show the claw hammer, and start roaring out of himself. As she waited on the mountain, Hannah jawed helplessly on her gums and tapped her phone for the time—it showed 7:17 a.m. and then died.

  Fuckwad, she said, and threw the phone to the dash.

  Castlebaldwin was a ten-minute scramble away and he’d been gone for more than twice that. The van had laboured to climb even the low mountains of the Curlews and she tried not to think deeply about its viability for escape. The drone from the N4 down below was becoming more steady, the morning traffic thickening to a stream. It was difficult to believe that just last night she had laughed with excitement as she took the first baby bump photo for her Insta and Setanta’s needle buzzed jauntily as he tattooed a lizard on his left calf. He told her in a voice scratchy with emotion that he loved her and that their souls were made of the same kind of stuff. She licked his earlobe and showed him the selfie and he cried in hard, gulpy jags. She did not remark that the lizard looked more like it had frog dimensions, really, nor that the rapid blinking effect had returned to Setanta’s left eye.

  She had asked him to leave the keys of the van but he would not. When he had a plan worked out his mouth fixed into a tight hard rim like a steel toecap. In truth, she knew well that Setanta Bromell of Frenchpark was not making solid decisions lately. She sneezed and reflexively laid a hand to her belly to reassure the visitor. High slants of sunlight now breached the top of the Forestry pines and showed a stretch of scarred hillside rising to Aghanagh bog. The gorse on the higher hills was lit from the inside ou
t an electric living yellow. Dead for half a year the Curlews were like some casual miracle reviving. Setanta Bromell said that May, always, was the number one month of the year for going mad.

  Passing through the narrow kitchen of her mother’s house, four and a half months previously, he had placed a hand to her skinny hip and turned on the cow eyes and that was enough. Her mother when she’d been drinking slept like the dead. By night, it had become the custom that Setanta and Hannah would talk. She liked to listen to his stories about work. He told her about the man with the huge swastika on his back that Setanta had remodelled into the ancient flag that showed in quadrants the symbols of the four proud provinces of Ireland: the red hand, the triple crown, the hawk and dagger, the harp.

  Better a ’Ra head than a Nazi, he said.

  There was a quick russety shimmer through the yellow gorse as a fox moved for her den. Hannah’s lips moved softly at the sight and made a wordless murmuring. Now the birds were going dipshit unseen in the hedges, in the pines. Setanta Bromell owed her mother, like, four grand? His eyes rolled up as if to see the stars when he came.