A Goat's Song

by Dermot Healy

  So, because of neighbourliness, or secret approval of his sense of courage and drama, or out of plain curiosity to see would the Catholics bury him in consecrated ground since it was rumoured that his church might not, Matti Bonner had a big funeral. People of most beliefs appeared, at least to walk the short distance behind the hearse. It was a time when all sects could attend each others’ funerals. Ecumenism was in the air, and the war had only just begun. Some of the more severe Presbyterians did disappear at some point on the street. They were still, for the moment, survivors. Others, the apologists, stood in the doorway of the chapel till the funeral Mass was over. Over the heads of the congregation they watched with fascination all that their forebears had forsworn take place on the altar. Lighted candles. Chalices. Beads in prayer. Instead of a supper that was a memorial, here was a feast that was a sacrifice. The ecumenical men looked on bemused at all the trappings, while others, like Jonathan Adams, watched with distaste the red gorge of the priest billow out like a frog’s as he drank the wine. His fingers fumble with the wafer. How he dusted his hands and knelt with a rustle and turned and blessed the congregation.

  The just shall live by faith alone, Jonathan Adams said to himself.

  The congregation could feel the priest’s embarrassment as he sprinkled holy water over the suicide and invited the soul to enter heaven. An eternity of the tabor. Four labouring men shouldered Matti high, and as the mourners walked behind, they looked at each other to see who was weakening. His death modified the Protestant strut, the Catholic lurch. The mourners did not grieve. Decency made it proper that they attend, not to grieve but to observe each other about their rituals. The warp of superstition attending this lone man into the grave. But then they were shocked to find that they were following the coffin of a man who by his death had belittled their existence. His suicide was preying on their minds.

  And when they buried him, it was into a deep compartment of the mind that they put Matti Bonner, a place where the existence of God has never been fully resolved, nor their own lives really authenticated. His death triggered off in their psyches questions about the meaning of the word everlasting, the meaning of despair, and the meaning of the concept of redemption. There could be no uplift of the spirit in burying a man who had died by his own hand opposite two churches on Thanksgiving Day. Even the earth that was thrown on his coffin was somehow transparent, made of nothing. And the prayers for the dead seemed the final blasphemy.

  Matti Bonner hanged himself from a birch that to the north commanded a view of a field where the Reverend Ian Paisley had come at midnight with torches and flares and flute bands to summon up votes for his entry into Stormont. Under it, Catholics usually stood smoking after Mass and watched the other sects file past. To the west was a small soccer pitch.

  From a distance the tree looked like a man taking off his feathered hat with a flourish.

  Some names had been cut into the bark with a penknife. The most famous of them now was Matti Bonner’s own, undated, dark and deep.

  The Irish for the townland was Cul Fada. The English was Cullada. In the fields behind the birch Matti Bonner used to turn hay for his Protestant neighbours when they went off to celebrate the twelfth of July. He would have known the birch from all sides. Now, when the Catholics passed the tree they made the sign of the cross, and when the Adams girls talked in their rooms they talked of Matti Bonner the bachelor, who used walk the back garden of his house with his flies undone. They’d saunter up the road to stare at the tree where the bit of a rope without its noose still hung; they’d pick their way down to the untidy house and peer into the rooms with dizzy stomachs, see the porringers and cups, the milk pail by the door. They’d see the old black Ford tipped into a ditch, the red, upturned cart, the TV aerial cocked back at an angle after a severe gust in a storm, the Christmas cards still on the mantel, and, despite the hostile Catholic spirit, they’d feel a twinge of sentiment. Then they came across the skull of a dead cow under the apple trees and thought it was his; they stood petrified in his galvanize shed in a fall of hail and knew God existed, and yet whispered hard, uncaring things.

  They were trying to outwit their fear.

  They could see his house from theirs, for theirs was next along, just a field away, and the house since his death seemed to have grown enormous. For now that he had died, his consciousness seemed to inhabit the place more fully. At night they could hear Matti whistling to his dog. From their upstairs bedroom they looked over towards his house and swore they saw a Scared Heart lamp burning. Congealed blood began to drip from the heart of Christ in his kitchen. His house grew more barbaric and profane than when he’d been alive.

  Because now, added to their disdain, came pity that turned to revulsion at the Catholic appetite for suffering.

  And because of what she had seen – this Catholic nightmare – and for fear the face of the dead man would haunt her, Catherine was allowed to sleep next to Sara, and from Sara’s window the girls now watched his house till the edge of the buildings gave off a blue haze. His sudden whistling could be heard through the trees. The poor man’s scandalous image of Christ burned through the night like a Christmas fairy. The hair stood on their heads. He was in Hell.

  “Is he there forever?” Catherine, terrified, ran in and asked her father.

  Jonathan Adams considered the word that gave rise to that concept of everlasting, meaning eternal, age-long. Was the absolute eternity of evil affirmed? Was there a difference between everlasting and eternal? He sought a psalm that might alleviate Matti Bonner’s suffering and calm his daughters’ fears.

  “For his anger endureth but a moment: in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning,” their father read from the book of Psalms.

  And then he considered the words for hell. Sheol: the world beyond the grave. Tartarus: an intermediate state prior to judgment. Hades: the unseen world. And Gehenna, the word the Lord had used: the common sewer of a Jewish city where the corpses of the worst criminals were flung and fires lit to purify the contaminated air.

  That was where Matti Bonner was, the girls decided as they stood by their window looking out into the darkness. And it was everlasting. Matti Bonner was in the Valley of Hinnom; his unburied corpse had been cast forth amid the worms and fires of the polluted valley. The stench of the dead reached them, and their cries, and then the yelps of a barking dog.

  In time Matti Bonner’s animals crossed the fields to the Adams’ house.

  His hens came. His white nanny goat, langled as she was, came over the walls on her knees. Finally came his dog. But the dog only came for food. Always he returned to his old house to wait for his master. Lights would go on, and lights would go off. Catholic relations trooped through the rooms like grave robbers. At midnight the dog would whine till all hours. He startled the geese who began honking and screeching. Cocks were crowing the night through. Reilly tore away with his claws at Matti Bonner’s kitchen door. “Let me in!” he yelled, “Let me in!” Then the seagulls chasing seed in the fields began barking like dogs. Reilly turned cross. The night was full of barking, followed by long mournful whining, till it felt as if only an animal could really mourn a human’s passing.

  If the girls went near the house during the day Reilly would turn on them, though he knew them both. He was cross, possessed, his spine drawn back like a bow. Yet when he came across to the Adams’ he would immediately roll on his back for them, baring his loins and smiling. By night the dog became the curse of the village. The girls would call him from their window. “Reilly,” they’d call. He’d stop a minute then carry on whining. The geese would screech. All manner of birds would wake. The night air filled with disturbance.

  The girls would lie in Sara’s bed listening to the dog and wondering at the nerve of a man who could hang himself opposite the two churches. They wondered how he felt as he walked to make his protest. The Protestant boys in the village said that when a man hangs himself his cock stands. They said that Matti
Bonner, the Taig, had his trousers open at the flies the day he died facing the Catholic chapel.

  That was what Sara wanted to know. Was it true? Had Catherine seen his mickey standing? Catherine said she thought she had seen something white like his belly. She could not be sure. But in time she came to believe she had. Yes, it was a stiff white cock. Not a married, fatherly cock, nestling quiet and brown on her father, but something foreign, something even independent of Matti Bonner. His cock took on a life of its own. In the dark she’d see it, the male penis that only stood when a man was hanged. First she’d see his face scowling and then his frail white member hanging, not standing, but childlike. Then, as the rope stiffened, so did his penis.

  “Could you see any hair? He had red hair,” said Sara seriously.

  “Yes,” she’d seen hair where his trousers had been torn by barbed wire. She saw the scratch marks on his skin. Their scandalous whispers grew enthralled by fear. Outside were dogs. Catherine’s lies and Sara’s imagination kept them hallucinating tiredly while they grew acquainted with Matti Bonner, the first real person they’d known to die. They grew to like their fear of this man as night fell. He had been such a man that if you looked away you would not remember him. He was a small house with poor walls, a name, a Catholic yard, a white bleating goat, a way of walking, a way of talking with bothered outbursts, a bachelor with a missing digit on the right hand. Someone they could look down upon. Now he was an immense frightening figure in a state of eerie erection whose pathetic dog, night after night, whinged on the step of his house.

  One night, the girls not only saw lights in Matti Bonner’s house, but furniture being hurled through the windows. The dog was frantic. Then, there was the sudden discharge of a shotgun, a terrifying shriek from Reilly, another shot and then silence. The countryside at last went quiet. The torment of his soul had suddenly ended.

  The next day Jonathan Adams said: “That’s it. Tonight, Catherine, go back to your own room.”

  “Daddy, I’m afeared.”

  “And what’s there to be afeared of?”

  “Matti Bonner.”

  “Go long.”

  “I am.”

  “That’s enough out of ye, once is enough, Catherine, for me to tell ye. Matti is in heaven.”

  “He’s in hell.”

  “Stop it, Catherine. Tonight you’ll hike yourself back to your room.”

  “But Daddy, he’ll folly me.”

  “Foll-ow!” the Sergeant said correcting her.

  “Follow,” said Catherine, “he’ll follow me.”

  “There’s no one going to folly ye, daughter.” He took her by the hand and the two stepped briskly along. “Once you start that kinda talk, you’re asking for it. People should learn when young to be alone.”

  So Catherine went back to her room and strangely enough Matti Bonner did not visit her that night. It was the ghost of the dog haunted her and Sara, till eventually the dog backed off, as a dog will in terror from the unknown. Reilly was forgotten. Matti’s house housed animals, his furniture sat in his nephew’s garage. The gap leading to the subconscious was filled in, and finally the land was sold to a Free Presbyterian from Tyrone who scoured the walls and the floors clean of all signs of Catholic possession and painted on the gable RIGHTEOUSNESS IS OF THE LORD.

  Across the fields Matti Bonner now lay in consecrated ground.

  But Catherine knew he was out there somewhere trying to get back in.

  The first time she lay tight against Jack Ferris she remembered the Catholic bachelor silently hanging from the tree and again imagined his member standing softly up out of his navy-blue trousers. It was not true, it had never happened in reality. But it did happen in her dreams. The erect penis meant death by hanging. Often in years to come she would jump awake covered in sweat to recall that a second before she had been making love to a disembodied penis. It was the penis of someone who wasn’t there. Only this male member jammed into her. She’d reach out to hold the person only to find him missing. The shock would bring her awake.

  Then she’d realize with a terrible sense of unease that there had been no man there a few seconds before, only this disembodied penis making love to her. And her unease would be greater when she’d remember that the penis belonged to Matti Bonner. He, she’d realize in terror, had been the strange elusive man she had been reaching out to embrace and comfort. But in her dreams there was never anyone there but a nameless spirit in a state of arousal. In panic she’d flail out either side of her to touch him, and wake terrified to find no one, only this distant sexual joy receding fast from her scalded thighs. A phantom penis had been sent to pleasure her in her sleep from the world of the dead.

  10

  The Fenian Ledger

  The chestnut trees blossomed. The Fermanagh village forgot Matti Bonner. But Sergeant Adams did not. Shocked by the death, he searched through his memory for the moment when Matti Bonner had betrayed by any word or gesture that he intended to take his own life. In the RUC station his fellow policemen had other things on their minds. But they said it was well known that he had threatened suicide.

  “Did he never, ah, say nothing tee ye?” asked the desk officer.

  “He did not mention this obsession,” replied Sergeant Adams, with a hint of regret.

  “And ye that drove by his door most every day,” the desk officer said in wonder. Then he laughed. “It goes to show ye can never trust a Roman Catholic.”

  But in Jonathan Adams’ mind the issue was one of delusion. For the past twenty years they had probably spoken to each other every day. And never once had Matti Bonner been anything but genial and offhand. They had an understanding. Now it made the Sergeant think he had imagined a friendship that did not exist. Matti Bonner had no confidence in him, the man’s tribal distrust had prevented him from asking for help.

  He had taken his secret to the grave.

  “The poor man must not have been well,” replied Maisie.

  “And why didn’t he tell us?”

  Sergeant Adams would often conjure up moments in the past. An image of Matti would materialize, an unprincipled and menial man in one sense, in another, dangerously subversive. When he touched the corpse he remembered the long drive they’d made together to Rathkeale. Two men in a car hurtling South without a word. The warmth of Matti Bonner’s voice behind him in the church the morning of his wedding – “Good luck. Boss. They’re good auld stock.” Now the dead man was a complete stranger.

  Jonathan Adams was stunned by grief. And so, despite being a policeman, he had braved the Catholic graveside to say his goodbyes to his best man. The men and women who stood in the graveyard were all enemies of Jonathan Adams. There was a cursory nod from the priest, a handshake from the nephew, a fatalistic silence, then they stood aside to give him a view of the naked coffin. Look what you’ve done, their movement said. I knew him better than any of you, he wanted to shout. But he acted his part. Submissive. Holier than thou. Yet somehow the sense of being at a funeral by-passed Jonathan Adams. For, throughout it, he was disputing with the living man.

  Why did you not speak to me? Why did you hold back? Where are you now? Well, one thing, there was no Roman Catholic priest to guide you into the hereafter when you died. Thinking this, Jonathan Adams felt blasphemous. “That’s what they do to us,” he recalled Matti saying, “slip an arm around you just when you’re gone senile. It’s the priest talking, not you at all. You’re not there. It’s the infant you once were is being blessed. Aye. I don’t want it. Never.”

  Thinking on these words, the Sergeant remembered how delighted he had been to hear a Catholic deriding the priests. But now the words, enriched by Matti’s death, returned to him from a different, dangerous perspective. For, though Matti had seen no priest and had died by his own hand, yet he had died a Catholic. It didn’t matter that there was no priest present. Now Jonathan Adams wished that the priest had been there to attend to Matti as he climbed the tree.

  For there was something offensive in
such a staunch death.

  Something that drove him to ask Matti, Are there balconies up there? Are there trees? Are there stars?

  Matti Bonner had harvested for both sides, and was known by none. Yet he died a Catholic. His religion could accommodate his despair.

  Now, about a hundred people stood round his grave, bound to him by mended fences, by the milking of cows, the shovelling of gravel, the spreading of manure. Thinking this, Jonathan Adams was struck by a sudden insight into the decency of Matti Bonner’s life. Many of the graves each side of the one he was being put into, Matti himself had dug. He would have cleaned his shovel with the heel of his boot onto the plot in which he now was laid.

  This togetherness of things, this stubborn harmony, this realization of how for years Matti Bonner had been separating himself from others so that he might have the strength to carry out his quest, struck the old Presbyterian with a fine high feeling of prophecy mixed with anger.

  He looked out onto the road at his car. He looked back at the chapel. What am I doing here? Then he stepped through the creaking turn-gate. He felt under the passenger seat for his rifle. He drove back towards the village. Some of those in the graveyard who had moved on to visit the plots of their relations watched him go.

  Jonathan Adams had white hair with black roots, salmon cheeks, walnut eyes and, in his latter years, a nervous shaking of the head and chin which he always feared might lead to the same Parkinson’s disease that killed his father.

  He had been a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary for thirty years, yet he had never managed to develop a policeman’s bearing. The uniform sat ill on him. The figure itself was apparently straight and manly, but was somehow not correct. Slouches hung around the buttocks and the armpits. And he never shook off the hump that learning had given him. Despite cultivating the rough accent of his youth and refining his knowledge, he had a habit of speaking above the other policemen. The other learned phrasing still haunted his words. Once upon a time his belief lay in the simple statement: Conscience demands knowledge. As a policeman he had to relinquish the higher ground, yet his scholar’s demeanour persisted in the hesitant tone of voice.