A Goat's Song

by Dermot Healy

  For three years prior to joining the police he had studied at small Presbyterian seminaries. The first in Belfast, which dealt with theology alone, then for a while in Edinburgh. Those few years had given him a scholar’s mien, and a dislike for what he called in a letter home to his father the mocking hypocrisy, defined scepticism, reeking impiety and shameless revelry of life beyond the new, emergent Northern Ireland State.

  It’s people that matter, the doctors told him. Be popular with the congregation. Keep up the home visits. You need peace of mind to find God’s will.

  His family helped the young student get his first living at Cullybackey in Co. Antrim. The apprentice minister was introduced to the elders in a low wooden church with a red galvanize roof. Only one masonic banner hung from the wall. He had chosen as his homily the powerful line – to give some form to that which cannot be uttered. It proved an unfortunate choice. For the minute he started to preach that which he had feared happened – he was possessed of such a feeling of disorientation that his chin and wrists shook uncontrollably. The joy the congregation did not see stirred in his soul, but elation did not reach his lips.

  Words refused to come to him. Meaning departed.

  “I would like to begin . . .” he hesitated, and then became trapped in a set of thoughts which were denoted by the pronoun “I”. “I,” he said again and stopped. To say “I” implied a thinking subject, and yet he suddenly realized: I know nothing of myself. To whom does this “I” refer? He tried desperately to get hold of some valid point of principle for his assertions, but a void opened. A tremor ran through him.

  “Abraham,” he said, “stands at the head of one dispensation; Moses at . . .” He steadied his hands. “David at the head of a third. John the Baptist . . .” He had seen it coming, this failure to preach, throughout all the weeks – the years – of preparation, and yet could do nothing about it. The sermon was a disaster. The arrangement of his thoughts spilled over into foolishness once he was confronted with that one word, that super-confident assumption of experience – “I”. And although he was greeted with sympathy, the young Jonathan Adams could not believe that joy would come in the morning.

  They had tried to teach him to read distinctly, but, in the eyes of the doctors he proved “a mean reader”. No matter how much he perused beforehand the chapters and homilies to be read in public, the words came out disjointed and led only to misunderstandings among the listeners. The pause they had instilled in him as a prerequisite for delivering sermons turned into a long embarrassing silence. If he lifted his head for a moment from the text, he found himself unable to find his place again. He’d stand transfixed before the eyes of the doctors and students and hear this remote foolish monotone issuing uncontrollably from his lips.

  “Perhaps you might consider scholastic teaching,” he was advised.

  “Never.”

  And so it came to happen in Cullybackey: his powerlessness was carried from the finite to the infinite. He looked up after the first line and saw his father out there being taken by a muscular spasm, and replied with one of his own. He found the next line, and then it happened again. The old RIC man was urging his son on with his eyes, but the shame of being an evangelical preacher who could not preach overtook Jonathan Adams. Look at the text, hear it in your head, it will reveal itself. Commence! These orders from the past issued more strongly through his mind than the words he intended to say.

  He had dreamed of this moment – the first sermon he would give – and now it was here. He had sought to prepare a text that would be lofty, indignant, mournful, eloquent; but when he looked at his father his sermon turned into a sorry performance bereft of definite views and strong convictions. His learning had turned to blather. “To give some form to that which cannot be uttered,” he repeated, blushing, in a false dramatic climax. At that moment he would not have minded being borne away to the great audit. The kirk greeted his finale with embarrassed silence. And afterwards the same nervousness afflicted him as he supped tea with his family and the congregation.

  After that first terrifying experience his heart quailed at the thought of having to perform at another public service.

  If he could only enter their interior without words! If even words could be swept away!

  His dreams of becoming another Wycliffe, Huss or Patrick Hamilton were shattered. Instead of his first sermon bringing him peace it had seemed as if he had returned to Cullybackey to answer an indictment. He felt like Knox before Queen Mary in the palace of Holyrood. But unlike Knox, he had acquitted himself badly. He had earned his family’s shame, his father’s rancour. As the doctors had foreseen, Jonathan Adams proved a poor preacher, unlike his brother Willy who was established in a living as a successful Evangelical minister in Tyrone. The mortification Jonathan Adams felt at the money wasted on him by his parents was increased when Willy left after the service without speaking to him. Over the following months he attended Synods, Presbyteries, Assemblies, but could offer no discourse.

  The elders who accompanied him tried steering him towards a clear strong delivery but his words on behalf of his congregation never rose above a whisper. Soon his stipend would come under question. He worked at becoming approachable, friendly, but only succeeded in creating greater distances between himself and those who wished him well; he tried to throw off his learning, but only succeeded in sounding condescending. Eventually the chore of being a churchman proved too much.

  He went to his father.

  “I think I must leave the Church,” he said.

  “Per-sev-ere!” his father replied staunchly.

  “I hear it in my head but it will not come onto my lips.”

  “It will in time.”

  But it did not. Still in a suit of grey Jonathan Adams stepped into a sunless office off the Crumlin Road in Belfast and signed on with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which had replaced the old RIC, disbanded after the new Northern Ireland state was founded.

  It was one final attempt to appease his father who had been a policeman before him. Old Adams had seen his son George established as an engineer in Toronto, his daughter as a librarian at All Souls in Oxford. Willy in a ministry in Tyrone. All his family had done well. But somehow Jonathan had let him down. He had not persevered. Like the Jonathan of old he had disobeyed his father. He had tasted food before evening had come. He did but taste a little honey with the end of the rod that was in his hand, and lo, he must die.

  If he could not spread the word of God throughout the new state, then at least, thought Jonathan Adams, he could guard its laws.

  His father’s words – if you leave the ministry of the Church you’ll be cursed – remained a challenge that Jonathan Adams had to contend with all his life. His first few years in the RUC were even more humiliating for him than his period as a Presbyterian minister. Those who joined in the twenties were old RIC veterans from the South as well as the North, and all, including ex-servicemen, were sure of preferment. They had quickly taken all available positions of authority so that the young Presbyterian men like Jonathan Adams who joined in the late thirties had little hope of improvement. They remained at the level of Southern Catholic RIC men who were reaccepted into the force only on sufferance. None had the chance of rising above the rank of sergeant until political experience showed that Catholic inspectors stopped the cries of sectarianism.

  He was assigned to a village in County Fermanagh. His ignorance of farming and farming communities was profound. He despised the uncouth RUC men who surrounded him, their corruption, their garrulousness, their ill-fed consciences, their sham, Church of Ireland pieties which seemed devoid of the principle that underlay true Protestantism. In his first station, his manners, temper, education and celibacy were a constant source of merriment for his fellow policemen.

  He lived in the barracks and slept in a small bed placed in an office off the day-room. It fell to him to do the last round of the village at night. The step was quick, faultless, unerring. He wrung the handle of every s
hop-door. Stood a second or two in the alleys off the pubs and listened acutely. Shone his torch into vehicles left overnight on the street. He read nightly to the sergeant’s children from the scriptures. Sat by their bedside during their fevers. Stoked the fires. Retired to his room to sit and read. Oil his revolver. Shine his buckles, his leather belt, his hat’s insignia. He did it without a soldier’s conviction, slowly, and then slept without dreaming. Drunks found porridge in their cell at first light. And morning found coals blazing in the blue-and-yellow tiled fireplace in the day-room. Jonathan Adams was already abroad on his bike, calling on people in remote areas to collect the unpaid licences for dogs, radios, bulls, guns, cars. He came only once to collect the fee. If it was not paid, then despite protests, the summons invariably arrived soon after, in that unyielding script the whole area recognized as stemming from the unforgiving, scholarly hand of Jonathan Adams.

  And when he entered the court with his victims, no first names passed his lips. Every man was Mister, even his neighbours. Jonathan Adams brooked no familiarity till the case was over. Civilians to him were criminals once they had charges to answer.

  “I’m afeared ye can’t address me now, Mr Pratt, if you please.”

  “Right, Constable.”

  In silence, like strangers, he and Pratt would sit on a bench outside the court, policeman and farmer, each eating from their own sandwich bag and drinking from identical blue bottles of milk. As they waited they studied the other offenders. The sheepstealers. The brawlers. The whispering doe-eyed Catholics who always lived in the vicinity of guilt. Avid with the assumption of contrition. Sly. The barristers. The brass nameplates of the famous above where they sat in the cold air of the outside chamber.

  “Now,” breathed Jonathan Adams, as Pratt’s name was called. He dropped a hand on Pratt’s shoulder and led him in. He stood by the accused throughout the proceedings, grim, unsmiling. Out came the notebook. On the 22nd of June I had reason . . . The business of the court took place in a formal language which pleased the constable. Then, when it was over, Pratt and himself climbed on their bikes and cycled home, shoulder to shoulder, through the tree-lined roads of Fermanagh.

  The Second World War came to his village. Americans moved through the fields in camouflage. Black men appeared in the choirs at church and sang lustily. And in the same way as he treated locals, Jonathan Adams arrested the soldiers for being drunk and disorderly. He brought charges of theft when he discovered goods sold between soldiers and civilians. With resentment he saw summonses dropped. He checked cars to see had the petrol originated in the camps. He checked food in shops to see whether it was of American origin. He hounded the by-roads where soldiers courted local women.

  The neutrality of the Southern Republic in the war only confirmed what he already believed – that this was a war begun by Hitler to reinstate Catholicism throughout Europe. This was why Spain remained neutral, this was why Mussolini entered the war on Hitler’s side. Rome, while the rest of Europe was devastated, sat out the war. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, De Valera, the Catholic warlords, and the Jesuits – these were the enemies of the Allies. But, at home, in Fermanagh, the law must take its course. He charged Yankee soldiers with indecent exposure when he found them urinating in the local graveyard. Jonathan Adams became the scourge of the military, and his activities led to a rift between the barracks and the American authorities.

  “I have a request here, Constable Adams, from the Americans,” said his sergeant.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “They would like you to allow them to get on with the war.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You think you can do that?”

  “If they’ll refrain from drunken excesses and sexual debauchery in the village.”

  “It’s a small price to pay, Constable, don’t you think?”

  After the war he was occupied with the black market, with smuggling and customs abuse between the Republic and the North of Ireland. One night, the only time he had done so, he discharged a shot over a boat on the Erne, then another, until the Bardwells came ashore with a cargo of butter. Then in the fifties came an IRA Nationalist campaign that soon petered out, but not as far as Jonathan Adams was concerned. Throughout it, and long after, he kept a list of Fenians from his district who were involved. Alongside each name was noted the date of birth, the background of the father and mother. Various relations who had possible Republican interests were added. In red he wrote under each Roman Catholic. Then went on to other headings: prison record, employment, local disturbances.

  On a scale of one to three he estimated their potential treason. Possible, definite, committed. It was on his word council houses were given, the few times they were given, to Catholics.

  If any Catholics applied for gun licences he took his Fenian ledger out and checked their credentials. And that same Fenian ledger was to dictate who would be arrested the night Internment began years later. Even after Jonathan Adams was long dead the list of names he had prepared was still running through the British Army computers at check-points and border posts throughout the North. It sat on the desk of intelligence agents in London.

  Each night during the fifties campaign he opened the ledger and added new names:

  Flynn, Nevill. Roman Catholic.

  B. 1932. Farmer. 14 head. Mixed marriage. Roman Catholic father, John. Mother, Church of Ireland, Dorothy. No prison record. Uncle, Robert Flynn, arrested after IRA raid on Beleek barracks. Eventually released without charge. Nevill Flynn suspected of storing arms. House searched four times in January, 1st, 22nd, 23rd, 31st. Nothing found, but library stocked with Nationalist literature. Refused to co-operate. Complained of ill-treatment by Special Officer Thompson. No basis. Sometimes drives a car registered in the South – ID 510. 42 acres. Lives at home. Neighbours convinced he is heavily involved. Stands while drunk provoking neighbours singing Republican songs out on the roadway. Believed to have torn down the Union Jack off a neighbour’s tree. Check with Special Officer Thompson about threat of “tearing his tonsils out”.

  Description: A drunkard. High complexion. 5 foot 11 inches. Eyes blue. Mousey hair. Inclined to stammer. No special distinguishing marks. Perhaps easily led.

  Possible.

  Throughout those years the barracks were turned into sleeping quarters for B-specials, who came in drenched in the middle of the night and lay exhausted in cells next door to the men they’d arrested, interrogated, and beaten. The B-Specials were supposed to be part-time policemen, but were in fact a private army over which the police had little control. Many were Southern Protestants who came from over the border and were bereft of all the austere religious convictions of their Northern Brethren. They were green Orangemen. They drank wildly, used crude language and created mayhem, then left it to the ordinary police to clean up after them when they went back to their safe lives in the South.

  When he let the Catholics out of their cells in the morning they complained in whispers about ill-treatment. Jonathan Adams neither spoke to them nor looked at them nor wrote anything down. They sought his attention, speaking to him in that beseeching tone of false innocence he so abhorred.

  “What have ye to say about this?” he’d turn and ask the Special when the barrage had finished.

  “It’s all lies,” came the reply.

  “Do ye want me,” he asked the prisoner, again without looking at him, “to take your complaint in writing?”

  “And be haunted?” The Nationalist would shake his head. “Away outa that.” Then Jonathan Adams would ask his name, address, age. This later, along with his observations, he’d add to the Fenian ledger. Next he took down the B-Specials’ reports.

  Mostly no charges accrued. A complaint from one side meant a summons from the other. He kept a neutral stance between the two. Then both parties waited while he went through the paperwork. Those days it seemed the stations were always damp. He could smell the wet from the bodies of the Cavan Specials as they sat puffy-faced and small-eyed for want of sleep
. Back across the border their animals were waiting to be fed. Beside them the Fenians looked into their hands. They waited. Then after a while he let them go.

  The B-Specials and the Republicans stepped onto the street and went their separate ways. This fighting too would end. And soon it did. Peaceful times returned to the province. Money intended for new council homes was instead spent on roads. The smell of tar crossed the province. Ulster began preparing to become an industrial miracle. Jonathan Adams became sergeant. Moved in alone to the married quarters. And here on winter nights he gave tuition in all manner of subjects to young scholars from the village, wrote out their job applications and filled in forms that their fathers could not understand.

  He drew up schedules, entered his observations in the daybook and placed each policeman’s wage in a brown envelope in the desk in the day-room. On each he wrote in pen the policeman’s name, the overall figure, tax reductions, special charges, certain fees.

  It was because of his fluency in the world of figures – exact figures – that Jonathan Adams eventually got preferment. The other policemen might consider him an oddity, an outsider, but he earned the rank of sergeant because his paperwork was always fastidious. The reports he drew up in the barracks were minutely detailed, dated correctly and coolly observed. His initials on a piece of paper meant all contained therein was exact. He was a man the judges liked to see in court. He may have been a poor preacher, but explaining facts came easily to him. His evidence was trustworthy. They understood each other, the judges and Jonathan Adams. The judges appreciated the discreet scholarly aside. The evangelical turn of phrase.

  For years he kept the same quiet profile. A reserved man, a church-goer who seldom went to church, a reader of odd doctrines, a man who lived by himself in the barracks, a man whose prejudices were hidden from the world. And perhaps he would have remained like that, if, in the same year that both his parents died, he had not met Maisie Ruttle, a gangly, fair-haired woman who was a Methodist, born and bred in the Free State. She had come North to work as a cook for Lord Brookborough. Jonathan met her on the tarmacadam path that was being laid through the estate. A roadworker had a finger severed by a winch that was hauling stone, and the police had been called. She was holding the man’s hand in a bloodied towel by the edge of the path under a spreading elm. Very gently she got the labourer seated next to her in the back of the police car. All the way to Enniskillen hospital she talked to the man as she held his wounded hand – you’ll be all right, don’t fret, easy now – and only let him go when the doctor came.