A Goat's Song

by Dermot Healy

  “A niggard,” added Catherine.

  “Good,” he said. “And what are the three angry sisters?”

  “Blasphemy,” recalled Catherine. “Blasphemy, strife, cursing.”

  “I’m sure they sound better in Irish,” explained Jonathan Adams. “Now, what are the three excellences of dress?”

  But the girls did not know.

  “You are wallowing,” he said, “in the cesspool of your own ignorance. You’ve come no speed at all.”

  Catherine, one summer, lay with a man much older than herself in a desolate field above the cliffs in Glenlara. He was a bird watcher who had hitched from Wicklow over to Mullet to see a bird unique in Europe. He was searching, he said, for a sight of the phalarope, a tiny rare red-necked wader on its way from the Arctic to Africa.

  “Here, take a look,” he said.

  She followed a tern going one way, then a shag going the other. He guided her eyes out to the islands. As she lay on her stomach looking through his binoculars, his hand rested lightly on her buttocks.

  She continued to look out to sea as his hand moved. She lay perfectly still as his courtship began. She did not move to stop him as he touched her. She thought it would all happen as it had back home. He’d lie on her a moment, moan, and turn away with his trousers wet. This man’s slowness she took for tenderness. His softness for concern. He was touching her all over. She left down the binoculars and lay there on her stomach letting it happen. And she lost herself for a while, until, just casually, she opened her eyes and saw a hand.

  With terror she wondered who owned the hand.

  When she found the hand led to a stranger, she suddenly sat bolt upright.

  She had got so carried away that she had forgotten all about the birdwatcher’s existence. That he was even there. That he existed at all. He had become a mere extension of her pleasure. She kissed his face intending to go. Her dress lay against his leg.

  “I’m too old for you,” he said.

  There was a brief silence.

  Then she looked down and saw the size of his penis, so swollen she wondered how it would fit into her.

  She asked: “Are you all right?”

  She curled her hand round it, then he lay her back again. She said no, but he searched and found the place. Ever afterwards, even before her most passionate love-making, there was an argument in her mind, the argument that began when this man continued on after she said no.

  Yet always also remained her sexual propensity for the stranger.

  He shouted after her as she ran off. She cycled home without stopping. She ran through the house and tried the handle of Sara’s door. But it was locked. She knocked but Sara would not answer. “I know you are in there,” Catherine called. She sat with her back to the door. She waited for ages, but Sara did not come out. So, she told no one about that first love-making, which when she was older she called rape, when she opened her eyes and saw the hand that belonged to a stranger, when she’d lain with a birdwatcher in Glenlara and forgotten that he existed.

  In his room, Jonathan Adams was engulfed in the history of fear. If he died, right now, he wondered, where would he be in his next moment of consciousness?

  If someone shot him now, would he suddenly dart awake after the resurrection? Would all that confused him now have been put to rights? Would Nimrod be there? Would Semiramis be there? Would Maisie? So Abraham departed, the Bible said, simply.

  14

  As Gaelige

  The study of local history took Jonathan Adams out of doors again. He went in search of news of the Godstone. He was directed by Joe Love to go to P. Noone’s public house in Belmullet town to hear the story of what the locals called the Naomhog – the small saint. He ordered a lemonade from the son of the house, who was behind the bar. Everyone stayed quiet for a time.

  “Do you think will it rain?” young Noone asked.

  “I don’t know,” someone replied.

  “Will it blow?”

  Then the old lady seated against the wall, proprietor of the pub, put the question to a Cork meteorologist who worked at the weather station.

  “You should know,” she said.

  The man looked into his glass.

  “What,” she persisted, “is the weather going to be like?”

  The weatherman went back on his stool, clutching the counter. He looked over, his small teeth bared with amusement, at Jonathan Adams.

  “Ask me tomorrow,” laughed the weatherman.

  “Damn your soul!” she replied. “Won’t I know myself what it’ll be like by then.”

  “What is the Naomhog?” asked Jonathan Adams, trying to curb his natural caution.

  “There’s the very woman will tell you,” smiled the meteorologist.

  “Yes,” the old lady said. “It was a stone statue kept on the Inishkea Islands that the people in another century, and for ever and ever before that, used to adore.”

  “What was it like?” asked Jonathan.

  “Well, it wasn’t like you or me, it was just a stone. That’s what the Godstone was.”

  “A round stone maybe,” said the son helpfully behind the bar.

  “They kept him,” said the old lady, “in a tweed jacket and trousers.”

  “In what?” Jonathan asked, marvelling.

  “In tweed I was told,” she continued. “And they prayed to him to keep the seas calm when they went fishing.”

  “And he did, no doubt,” interrupted the weatherman.

  “He was more reliable than you are,” she jibed. “They prayed to him that their fishing might be successful. That he bring them luck. Then a group of visitors to the island saw the locals praying to the Naomhog, and they brought the story back with them to Dublin.”

  “Of course,” said the Corkman drily.

  “And an item appeared in a daily newspaper about the idolators on Inishkea Island.”

  “Trust them,” the Corkman said to Jonathan.

  “I don’t know about that,” she said. “And this item infuriated the local curate – one Father Pat O’Reilly – so much that nothing would do him but that he hire a boat to take him out to the island. Oh, he was mad. It was a pity there was a vessel to be had. They should never have brought him.”

  “They should not,” said the son.

  “What harm were they doing? None.”

  “That’s right,” said the son.

  “And he went out to the Inishkeas, took the Naomhog and threw it into the sea.”

  “After he smashed it,” nodded young Noone.

  “Tell him the kernel of it,” said the Corkman knowingly.

  “Well, that same Father Pat was my great grand-uncle. Upstairs I have his memorial card, and his breviary.” The old woman shook her head. “It travelled down to us. And there it is up above!” She looked upward in amused dismay. “He never should have done it. It brought bad luck on him. He took an ailment of the face and died six months after. As a matter of fact, all that had anything to do with the destruction of the Naomhog died soon after. And eventually the drownings came on the people of Inishkea. They left. And the government put them into Glash.”

  “And Glenlara,” added the son.

  “There’s not a soul out there now,” she said. “Oh, they were superstitious people then, God bless us. But he should never have done it.

  And she shook her head mournfully in Jonathan Adams’ direction. That night the Sergeant wrote down the story of the Naomhog exactly as he’d heard it. He tried to imagine a stone god in a tweed suit that could calm the sea. He stood on the pier and looked out at the Inishkeas with the same wonder he had once looked at the Isle of Purity. A man on the pier hailed him.

  “I hear you’re interested in the islands?”

  “I am.”

  “Well Bernie Burke is the man to take you out there. Aren’t you, Bernie?”

  “I will, surely.”

  “Someday,” said Jonathan.

  “They know we’re Protestant,” complained Adams to his wif
e.

  “Why wouldn’t they. We don’t go to Mass.”

  “I hope you’re not suggesting that we should.”

  They were plied with questions in Lavell’s shop. While Maisie filled a shopping bag, the old policeman stood uneasily inside the glass door, nodding fretfully at each further invasion of his privacy.

  “Aren’t you the great man,” said Mrs Lavell, “for your age.”

  “He’s quick on his feet, right enough,” said Maisie.

  “You must have had an active life,” queried the shopkeeper, “before you retired?”

  “Oh, he was always on the go,” said Maisie.

  “And what will he find to do out here, God bless us?”

  “He’s writing.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’m writing,” he explained to Mrs Lavell, “a short religious history of the Mullet.”

  “And would a book like that sell?” she asked, astounded.

  “Won’t it pass the time for him?”

  “I’m sure it will, the poor cratur.”

  Word got round that Adams was a deeply religious man who was penning an ecclesiastical account of Protestantism in Erris. On the road, people stopped to tell him names of long departed landlords, of churches gone into ruin. The Mullet folk told him stories of proselytizers of whom many, in years gone by, had come to the west.

  “Are you sure you’re not one yourself, Reverend?”

  “You can rest easy there.”

  “Well, even if you were you’re too late. The Irish Church Mission was here before you to teach the orphaned girls. They were housed for their pains just over there. Then a Father Nangle went to Achill to teach and feed the Famine victims. He did well, but his crowd are gone too. Oh, the Protestants came and went and here we are, Catholics still, for our sins.”

  And they laughed: “Now if you could build us a new bridge! Or give us jobs – who knows.”

  He wanted to hear everything. And each night he wrote up all he heard – who had returned from abroad, who’d gone away. He began recording what the gravestones told of that departed world of Protestantism, he wrote down speculations about stone-age settlements up at Aghadoon; he heard variations on the population of Belmullet and the population of Binghamstown; he was told stories of the old workhouse that became the fever hospital, of potato gathering in Scotland, of the disappearance of the barley and rye; he wrote short pieces on certain Saxon words still in use; he got a book from the travelling library that told him of findings from the Spanish Armada in Erris; he heard tales of the disappearance of the salmon, and the return of the salmon; he saw photographs from the good fishing days when Spanish and Welsh boats sheltered in Blind Harbour; he read of the daily trips to Sligo by sea. He wrote down tales of extraordinary and multiple animal births.

  His book he called: The Mullet Ledger.

  The people, learning the knack of his mind, ironically told Jonathan Adams extraordinary tales which he faithfully recorded. George Bernard Shaw going by Elly’s Bay on a white ass during the Second World War. Synge, in 1904, taking notes for The Playboy of the Western World in the Royal Hotel. John McCormack, the tenor, breaking into song in the Seaview. A phrenologist from Cork who came and measured the old people’s heads in the thirties to see was the head of a Catholic any different in size than the head of a Protestant.

  “Did they arrive at any conclusion?” asked Jonathan.

  “If they did, they didn’t tell us, Reverend,” laughed the woman.

  “Bingham was the last Protestant to live on the Mullet,” said Bernie Burke. “The last Bingham married a Catholic in the thirties. And he and the wife had an arrangement. If boys were born they’d be Protestant like yourself, excuse me, and if girls, well then they’d be Catholic. The last Bingham must have been an honest man. In one way. And a sorry one at that. For it was girls the poor woman had and I mind my father saying he saw them when he was young. Auld Bingham did not care to cross his wife. The daughters grew up Catholic and so auld Bingham lived to see himself as the last Protestant on Mullet.”

  “He was hard, you see,” said old Mrs Noone. “He brought bad luck on himself.”

  “Oh, the Protestants are gone,” said Bernie. “I can’t think of one now. As a matter of fact, I don’t think there are any.” He thought for a moment. “Yes, Bingham was the last.” Then he shook his head and smiled benevolently at Jonathan. “Until you came, Reverend.”

  They had chosen a peninsula where not one non-Catholic lived. The Carters, the Binghams were gone. The Protestants of Rossport, Rinroe, Portacloy, Laughmurray and Gorteadilla – all gone. Or if they were out there he could not find them. The Adamses were alone. He wrote down the stories and yet contended with his own life in a logical and legal way, as if fairies existed only in the minds of the people and not in his. His own mind, he believed, was an exact apolitical place guarded by sanity.

  Disreputable locals who found their way into the house threw bleary looks at the girls. With the help of intoxicating liquor the Sergeant coaxed from them scandalous verse on local landlords. The wording of curses, old cures, songs of losses at sea, historical verse as Gaelige. He bought books in Irish for his daughters which no one could read, even with the help of a dictionary. Then he began a history of the place names of the area where the old evangelists and missionaries had lived. In America Street himself and Maisie visited the ruins of the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel. Inside not a whit remained, only stacked benches against the wall. The light from the shuttered windows fell onto a pool of water beneath a leak in the roof.

  Maisie stood in the middle of the floor and said: “My father would die if he saw this.”

  “America Street?” asked Jonathan Adams of Joe Love.

  “Oh, a fellow called Seán Reilly from Muings bought up the entire street. It was then Ballyglass Street. And he named it America Street. He’d made a mint in the States. They called him locally, wouldn’t you know, Seán America.”

  Through Joe Love he was given sight of a bundle of letters in a local house that had been written by Presbyterian emigrants who’d left for America in one of the Famine ships. The list of deaths and trials at sea read to him like poetry. For the first time in his life he felt that literature might open the door that politics had closed on him.

  Jonathan Adams stomped round the townlands drawing maps and marking in the boundaries of the old landlord’s houses while Maisie sat in the car reading gardening books. Each place name had a different resonance and sound depending on who was talking. He wrote down the different versions and then tried them out on his neighbour Joe Love, who would guess their meaning. He watched Bernie Burke heading past the house with plastic bags of fish. A greeting in Irish was called. His lack of Irish began to infuriate him. Every door to the peninsula’s past was closed to him. The Irish language was denying him entrance.

  “I need books,” he told Maisie, “and I need maps that are not Catholic maps.”

  He decided he must go down to consult the authorities in the Customs House or wherever a body went. But first he wrote to all the Presbyterian, Protestant and Methodist Church bodies for information on their former congregations in the Erris area. Then he sent all his findings off to the National Museum and waited to hear from them. No reply came. He could wait no longer. He took his Mullet Ledger and prepared for a trip to Dublin.

  It was an extraordinary embarrassment for Jonathan Adams that he had never stood in Dublin. Money, a train schedule and a change of clothes were sorted out. He took the car to Castlebar. The scholar was to be gone a week. In fact, he was back in three days. Furious, he stepped in through the door, gave a savage shriek when spoken to, and retired to his room black-faced. For days not a word was spoken at meal times.

  His daughters feared that he was back to being a Loyalist again.

  At last, he brought himself to say: “My whole findings are seemingly of no scientific interest. And what I’ve learned has already been published.” He looked at Maisie. “Do you think I am too old to learn
a new language?”

  “Are we going to France?”

  “Be sensible, woman!”

  The women had never seen him so upset.

  “They took me for a crank!” he shouted. “They took me for a figure of fun! I’ve picked my own out of their blood in a heap on the road and these Nationalists have the temerity to laugh at me!” The blood ran to the exasperated old policeman’s head.

  His pride was gone. His chin at odd moments shook in a manner that made his daughters look away. From having developed a silent convivial nature since his retirement, he returned to his old austere self. “Take off those shameless garments!” he screamed. He became for a while a dispirited, aimless soul, as he’d been after Duke Street. “I shall die in this godforsaken hamlet,” he complained to Maisie. “And worse, without knowing its nature.” He now dreaded going from one room to another. But the women would not let him be. They carried on as before.

  “Do you know that we are the only Protestant family on this peninsula, are you aware of that?” he shouted at Maisie. “And you! You brought us here! And what I would like to know is what we are doing here? Have you any answer to that?”

  “No, Jonathan. If you want us to return we can do so.”

  “I do want to return!” he exclaimed fiercely.

  His rages were sudden and exhausting.

  They were back in earlier times, when racked by fear and wrath, he’d shut himself away in his room in Fermanagh. He threatened to leave. To sell the light-keepers’ house. He complained of an irritation of the bowel which the girls did not believe he had. It was an excuse for Maisie to take him away from Mullet. They drove to Castlebar hospital for tests but nothing was found. His anger increased. The girls and Maisie dreaded his sudden explosive outbursts at the kitchen table.

  “I never want to see this place again,” he’d say savagely. “I’ve been taken for a fool.”

  “Have ye been talking about me?” he shouted at the girls. “I told you not to breathe a word about the RUC!”

  “I didn’t!” answered Catherine.

  “Someone has.”

  “No one knows, Jonathan,” said Maisie gently.