That Old Country Music

by Kevin Barry

  She waited. The Transit van smelled like a stale morning mouth. She listened for the growls of the dirtbike climbing the backroad but no sound rose above the birds, above the N4’s sea-like drone, above the hot wind in gusty snaps from the hillside.

  Her hands lay folded loosely across her belly. She tried to do what the lady doctor at the clinic had told her to do in the panic times—she felt out her breaths on an individual basis. You had to get yourself on intimate terms with every breath that passed through your body. You had to listen to each breath as it travelled and smooth out its journey. In the Transit she sat and concentrated as well as she could but still her breaths came short and wildly.

  Now the sunlight broke fully across the canopy of pines and came starkly through the van. Hannah closed her eyes against it to see dreamy pink fields on the backs of her lids. She clawed at the greasy vinyl of the seat. She listened, and in the gaps between the wind it was just the birds in conference, in the high springtime excitedly, a vast and unpredictable family.

  Still on the air there was not a whisper of Setanta Bromell’s dirtbike.

  He did not drink much. She’d say that for him. He would sit up late while her mother slept. For a long while, they had sat at opposite ends of the L-shaped sofa, as far apart from each other as they could get, which in itself had signalled a situation. He said that particular stretches of ground had for him a lucky vibration. He said the Curlews most of all. Once a prime buck had skittered from the ditch and lurched into the side of the van and dropped stone dead of the shock and all Setanta had to do was haul it home and hang it to be skinned.

  These are the type days I get in the Curlews all the time, he said.

  He spoke often of fatedness and of meant-to-be’s. Then came the three a.m. of his soft, slow hand in the kitchen, and it was a case of smoochy-smoochy and throwing each other up against the walls before anyone knew the fuck what was going on.

  She pulled down the sun visor for its mirror. She had a face on her like a scorched budgie. She detested her new self. By nature like a stick, she was taking on weight with the pregnancy. Beneath her breath, she made the words of a Taylor Swift song for distraction but the song did not take.

  News headline: there was no sign of Setanta Bromell on no fucking dirtbike.

  She saw him with his limbs splayed on the petrol station floor. She heard the ratchety cruel tightening of the cuffs. Or maybe the Belarusian who worked the morning shift had just hopped the counter and grabbed the hammer and laid Setanta out flat with a single bop to the broadside of the head. The Belarusian was a massive fuck who must have weighed about as much as a cement mixer. Setanta’s plan had gaps and weak spots.

  Hannah Cryan climbed from the van and walked from the Forestry pines onto the backroad. By now the morning had clouded over and the vast spread of the whitethorn blossom across the hillsides and the high fields and the ditches made an ominous aura as it moved in the wind. Once, as a child, she had been slapped across the face by her mother for bringing an armful of the blossom into the house. The whitethorn flowers so much as passing the threshold was a harbinger of certain death in the family. By about the Tuesday of the next week. She had meant it as a gift for her lovely young mother.

  As she sat on a five-bar gate up in the Curlew Mountains the great meanness of the morning descended on her. She hummed a string of four or five notes against the meanness, not knowing where they came from nor how.

  The plan was that they would drive through the day and the north to the ferry at Larne for Stranraer, and from there descend through Scotland and the Borders—she watched his lips move as he recited solemnly the steps of it—through Cumbria to Yorkshire and to his cousins in the city of Wakefield. Over the nights, as they conspired, the word “Wakefield” had taken on the burnish of legend. She saw the city lights spread out. She imagined a child with a north of England accent and a neat little flat in a tower block. She saw herself and Setanta in the bed eating toast and taking photos of each other—his muscles flexed; her eyelashes fitted—and the toddler gurgling along in pure happiness on the rug on the floor. Setanta Bromell might soften his cough in Wakefield, she believed, and think harder about his decisions, and forget all the nonsense with the lizards and the claw hammers.

  The day was up and about itself.

  The fields trembled.

  Catastrophe was a low-slung animal creeping darkly over the ditches, across the hills.

  Her mother had found her one careless morning under the throw on the sofa, topless and asleep in the hot, emotional clutches of Setanta Bromell. That had made it a morning for the annals. Since then, they had slept in two sleeping bags zipped together at his King Ink studio. The studio was located over a butcher’s shop in Boyle. It reeked of their wild love and animal death. Setanta was eighteen months behind on the rent and had a notice to quit and lately this involuntary blinking in the left eye.

  But desperate times, he said, very often turned out to be disguised opportunities.

  Wakefield, as a shimmering prospect, was held aloft before her like a priest’s chalice.

  By now she knew that he would not come back from Castlebaldwin. On the five-bar gate of a tiny farm high in the Curlew Mountains she again closed her eyes for the pink fields. She went into a dream. If the moment was never-ending it might not even exist. She felt the presence of something very old and uncaring on the air. An insect’s steady keening from the ditch was incessant like a hopeless prayer or the workings of his needle. He had tattooed on her inner thigh a swallow in flight.

  In the black times make you think of summer, he said.

  In the black times, she thought, it’d take more than a badly drawn swallow aiming for my fucken gash.

  He was probably in the holding cell at Ballymote already. He was already on first-name terms with every guard in the vicinity. Setanta Bromell was—and here the words came unbidden, as if from an old ballad recalled—already in chains. The new life within twitched with nervous expectancy. As if it knew already of all the disasters to come.

  Hannah Cryan came to ascend from herself. Above the green fields and the whitethorn blossom moving in the morning wind, above the stone walls and the Forestry pines, above the inland sea of the grasses, above the broken drone of the motorway, above all of this she measured out the stretch of her seventeen years. They had been mean and slow-feeling years. She was almost as old as the century and felt it. Her man in jail and a child at the breast—it was all playing out by the chorus and verse.

  Her legs weak, her step uncertain, feeling lightheaded and frightful, she trailed back to the van and climbed into it. She sucked the last warm dregs from a bottle of water on the dash but her thirst was not sated. Often he kept six-packs of sparkling water from Aldi in back of the van. For his digestion, he said, which was at the best of times troublesome.

  She got out and opened the back doors and rooted around among her fiancé’s astonishing detritus. She found no water but she did find the ten-euro claw hammer from Simons Brothers hardware.

  The scales of the morning fell away.

  She stood by the side of the van with the claw in her hand.

  She swung it hard and precisely to extract the eyes from the brute, lying face of Setanta Bromell. That the sockets might dangle and his lively tongue loll.

  She hadn’t the strength to climb back in the van. She sat on the ground on the pine kernels and cried for a short while. A few months ago she had been skin and flint and edges and points—she had been hard—but now she was softened and plush like a lazy old cat. It was foreign to her. She felt slowed and mawkish with it. He had softened her merely with glances, his touch and words. More than softened, she had been opened.

  On the mountain time loosened, unspooled.

  The fields blinked.

  The gorse whispered.

  Morning?

  It must have been coming
by now for noon. If she had the legs to carry her, they might take her the five miles down to Boyle. But if she did not get past this moment, she would not have to face the next.

  She looked out across the high fields. Just now as the cloudbank shifted to let the sun break through the whitethorn blossom was tipping; the strange vibrancy of its bloom would not tomorrow be so ghostly nor at the same time so vivid; by tacit agreement with our mountain the year already was turning. The strongest impulse she had was not towards love but towards that burning loneliness, and she knew by nature the tune’s circle and turn—it’s the way the wound wants the knife wants the wound wants the knife.

  Now she heard before its sound even broke on the air the scratch and meek resolve of her mother’s Corolla. It was neither taxed nor insured. It was taken out only at moments of high emergency. These were not yet so few as her poor mother might have hoped.

  And yes, here it came, inevitably, around the bend from the backroad into the Forestry pines, and Hannah felt a volley of tiny kicks within.

  Lou-Lou Cryan was a hollowed woman now. She was like a reed from the drink and the nerves. She stepped from the Corolla and came soft-footed and stoically through the gloom of the pine trees to take her daughter in her arms.

  Oh you poor fool, she said. Oh you poor sweet fucking fool.

  ROETHKE IN THE BUGHOUSE

  In 1960, the American poet Theodore Roethke and his wife Beatrice spent time on the island of Inishbofin, off the coast of County Galway. While on the island, Roethke had a breakdown and was committed to the psychiatric hospital at Ballinasloe, back on the mainland.

  The limbs of a dead whitethorn appear in the dark to say that the night dissolves. The large dishevelled man fills the hospital window with a spidery grin as the last of the dark gives out to grey morning. The morning comes up after a night such as this and you feel like you’ve fought a fucking war. Now come the slate roofs and the chimney pots and all the weary rest of it—Ballinasloe is greyly waking. He turns to the slight man sat neatly in a bedside chair with palms rested on cheerful knees.

  —What did you say your name was, Doctor?

  —I didn’t. I’m O’Reilly.

  —Oh, I’d believe it.

  The doctor has spatters of mud or cowshit on the hems of his trousers. Equine snout, tiny head. He half rises from the chair and turns it to face the thin new light in the window and sits again.

  —And how should I address you, Mr….

  —It’s Ret-kuh. But you can call me Ted.

  This all seems entirely reasonable. Yes I am Ted and I am made of flesh, bones and gases, and this spidery grin. Anxiety folds away its arbitrary music. Unquestionably I could use a drink also. Now the large man can feel the grin detach itself from the tight lines of his mouth. August here is dense as a jungle in the rain and it plays sour notes in his glands and pulses.

  —Are you experiencing agitation, Ted?

  —Well!

  All this and heaven, too. He arranges a sigh and to emphasise it rests a buttock on the edge of the mattress. Bony as an army bed. The doctor crosses his legs now. The doctor sits a kind, interested chin on his knitted fingers.

  —In truth, Dr. O’Reilly, I’d say there’s been nothing that’s absotively a surprise to me.

  All this coming and going from himself. He would like very much now to spread his fat limbs in the water. Because I could float like a lilypad and I am beautiful in the water, I have such grace when I am floating there. There is a burning sensation in his chest. He would like a tall stiff drink and he would like to fumble with some skirt in a taxi. I think I could make you shriek, actually.

  —What it is, it’s a fucking joke, you take absolutely and positively and stick ’em together, I am aware of my fucking words, O’Reilly.

  What is it, the line from Hopkins? I am gall, I am heartburn. You need to try some Pepto-Bismol, friend, and you need to try it today. This doctor’s head is quite simply too small for a grown man’s, it gives him a beany look. Very punchable.

  —I understand that you write?

  —Oh, angelically.

  On Inishbofin he looked to the sky and saw fires on the moon. He lay wrapped in his overcoat on the pier all night long and for a while a safe harbour it seemed. Yes there was a bottle and Mars also was visible.

  —About this recent unpleasantness, Doctor. It’s nothing I can’t handle.

  Cold white wine. A bellyful of shellfish. A hotsy-totsy in a yellow cab. The city’s rank night odours. Her pearl buttons straining. And seeing as you ask, girl? Well yes, the thought is always crossing my mind. And I do mean always. I think that we could do filthy things together. Just you and me.

  —I believe that it’s poetry, Ted?

  —Fuck off.

  —Ah now.

  —I’m sorry.

  —That’s all right. I believe it’s poetry that you write?

  So do I—no, that’s pat, the line swings out too easily.

  —It intends to be.

  Oh you pompous ass with your handsome jowls, your lurching heart! This doctor is a religious, I can tell, the placid godhaunts of his pale green eyes.

  —Did you come loose of yourself on Bofin, Ted?

  —That’s a very attractive way of putting it, Doctor.

  Here we are in our sombre grey palace. Here we are in our stone grey town. Bal-in-a-sloe, apparently. Sloe gin. Slow love. Shall we make an afternoon of it, lady? I watched you walk the beach on the island, Beatrice, and the breeze moved the sand in circling drifts, and it settled and sang again in the breezeless gaps, and you found in the white sand your ritual things, your pebbles and shells, and the way you dipped like a bird to peck them free.

  —At the very least we can try some other medicines, Ted. You’ll sleep anyhow, I’m sure of that.

  This is all very fucking civilised. The day comes up hot and airlessly to fill the sour green ward and we connive most sensibly, this smiling doctor, this somewhat penitent loon. Though in truth I would quite like to fuzz up your smile, O’Reilly. See if you might misplace your faith. Shall I lead you through the caverns of this fat old skull then? Dank, oh dank places! Caverns full of black hissing water through which sometimes still I rise up to myself.

  —You’re crying a lot, Mr. Roethke.

  —It’s because I’m so tired now. The worst of this is done, believe me.

  He had walked the corridors to pace off the night. He closed his eyes and drifted the island again as he paced. On Bofin there were bits of sheep everywhere. Hanks of dark bloodied wool along the roads and snagged in tidy clumps on the roadside wires. The road circled the island and brought him back to himself again. The road was so comically narrow he could lie across the entire breadth of it and did. He listened to the aches beneath the skin of the road. He conversed with the inanimate. Bloodied wool, rotted skulls, maggoty—there were horns and bones everywhere in neat piles cleaned smooth by the salt wind. Mutton necropolis. Lichen beautiful on the stones a yellowish green flecked with tiny black parts. I wonder if I exhaust you sometimes, dear Beatrice? It cannot be an easy ride. But of course I promise to write your name across the stars and years. That old promise. It is what sustains my kind. It is what keeps us coming in a grinning line. Ted Roethke walked the corridors almost the whole night through. Beyond the high windows the moon waxed heavily on County Galway.

  —Did you know that madmen are much the same everywhere, Dr. O’Reilly?

  —Much of a muchness, Ted, do you believe so?

  —I do, actually.

  Some whang-doodle off a hill farm—you can tell the hill people everywhere, too, the wind-startled look—some whang-doodle wept into his chest as he mooched the corridor and made two syllables again and again, a name, and wept to his chest, and I bet those were the syllables of his mama’s name, her name forever on his dry cracked lips and his shit-crusted shirt-tai
l hanging all undone. What is with these Micks and their mothers? On Bofin grown men drank pints of milk with their spuds and stew. Creamy moustache, peat smoke, poem? Too easy, Ted. Fucking teat complex. Now ambition in the heavy morning jangles a single manic chord. He considers suavely the needle-thin doctor.

  —Is this a reasonable kind of establishment, Doctor? Is this a reasonable kind of town?

  —Tell me what you mean.

  —Might a man go for his walk in the evenings, take the evening air?

  —There’s one pub I’ll allow you to go to, Ted. Our nurses drink there and they’ll look after you.

  We understand each other, clearly. Yes, much of a muchness. I am the large trembling electrified type hot-eyed with unnameable passions. He has seen my cut so many times. Ted is smiling now, Ted is benevolent—he shifts the second buttock onto the mattress. The doctor murmurs encouragingly—a wood pigeon sound from his hollows, gently. Ted is moving in for a while. He will rest his bones here for a good long while. Certain concessions have been made. Hoarsely now a crow calls—the crows patrol the grounds in knee-high boots like swaggering swing-keys of the place.

  —How have the nights been for you, Ted?

  —The nights have been complicated.

  —As though they might go on forever?

  And full of occult music. The nights on Bofin were lit by the moon that lived above the harbour and yes, truly, there were fires on the moon. He sat on the pier and wrapped himself tightly in his overcoat. The wind moved in cold sharp points and ambition was again his currency. Shall I never be satisfied, he asked himself, quite harshly, on the pier at Inishbofin, his legs crossed at the ankles.

  —Is this a happy town or a saddish kind of town, O’Reilly?

  —Do you believe that towns have their own emotions?

  —It’s clear to me. Also they are sexed.

  —I’m interested in this.

  —All you have to do is look out the fucking window, Doctor. This Ballinasloe is very obviously a female place.