A Goat's Song

by Dermot Healy

  After a while he lifted his eyes and looked at the teacher.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I get these touches of indigestion. I’ll go upstairs to my study now.”

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “No, thank you,” said Jonathan Adams, “I’ll just go above.”

  He stopped at the foot of the stairs again. Another cramp pinned him to the bottom step. It passed.

  O’Muichin’s only bad points were flicking cigarette ash over the kitchen table, singing songs in Gaelic to himself at all hours of the night, suddenly cursing in a sharp Dublin aside, and shying away from all intimacy with the girls, beyond what his teaching called for. In the morning, Maisie would find the bed made, the hearth in his room littered with the stubs of cigarettes, and the candles he had brought with him burnt to a spit on the mantel.

  “Why the candles?” she asked him.

  “For the same reason that I love to listen to the rain,” he explained.

  Religion was another matter. Each Sunday he attended a different church. And yet if he was asked, as he was by Catherine once, did he believe in God, he answered: “We have been alone for such a long time and then one day, one man comes along. Yes, Christ. I suppose it must mean something.” Then he considered her question. “But God? Well, I love the man who made the world, but I don’t believe in him.” For a while it appeared he might continue, but then he winked and smiled, and Sara bared her bottom teeth to keep herself from laughing, for he seemed a very timorous man to be taking on the whole world. But he did not enter into such matters while he instructed the Master in his study of Sweeney, or the pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne, or the Children of Lir.

  “Have you been to the Island of Purity?” asked the Sergeant.

  “What’s that?” asked the teacher.

  “Inishglora.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “You should go, for that’s where those swans ended their days.”

  “I didn’t know. One has to assume certain things.”

  “That is your error. You can assume nothing. Nothing at all.”

  These mythological tales, though they were known to the Sergeant in English, gained a vexing physical presence in the vernacular, so that in his dreams some strange man – perhaps O’Muichin – drove a herd of sheep, with the heads of men, before him; humans with whom he was somewhat familiar adopted the forms of animals he could not recognize; MacDonagh returned as a goose; and in one striking dream he saw his daughter Catherine ride a goat along the edge of a cliff while he called and called after her in vain. O’Muichin, besides reading hands, was also an interpreter of dreams, and on hearing the father’s dream of the goat he said that the dream went back to Jonathan Adams’ reading of Greek mythology. He said that the dream was one of two things, as all dreams are.

  “And what are they, may I ask?” enquired the Master.

  “I would have to know first,” smiled O’Muichin, “whether the goat was a nanny or a buck.”

  Jonathan Adams for a long while considered the unruffled mien of the man who was telling him his dreams were prompted not by classical tales but by the gender of animals.

  “Would you not consider that interpretation a bit farfetched?” he asked.

  “Next time you see the goat,” whispered O’Muichin, and he came closer to the Sergeant, “next time, now, that you see the goat – excuse me – check to see if it has its equipment.”

  “I see,” said the Sergeant.

  O’Muichin winked, and turned the talk to Oisin.

  “It’s hard to credit him, sometimes,” said Sara, elsewhere.

  “He’s not afraid, anyway,” said Catherine in a tone of voice that intimated she was standing up for him.

  It was a Sunday, and later on that afternoon the Irish speaker turned despondent. It was the same boredom as before. There were no lessons that day. Not a word after dinner could be got out of him, and even leaning on the pier of the gate considering the village going about its business could not raise his spirits.

  “Are you not speaking to the poor?” Sara asked him.

  “I feel like I am expecting someone,” he explained.

  “There’s a dance next Friday night in Bangor-Erris, if you’d care to venture there.”

  “B’fheidir,” he muttered. “I like the western ladies. I never heard the word lady used except in a derisory fashion till I came here. I like the western ladies, I must admit. They are very open.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I do indeed.”

  He remained preoccupied, and just nodded at everything she said. Sara sat up on the gate and kicked against the pier. Catherine passed between them and went up to the village thinking: “Where is the rotten fucker who will love me?” The other pair stayed on silent by the gate.

  “When someone gets like you I always feel to blame,” Sara said.

  Coming out of his reverie, O’Muichin thought aloud: “I have a feeling that I went this way once before.”

  O’Muichin, precursor of other lovers to come in the life of the girls, looked up at the starched white sky across which he could feel the sea moving. A cloud crossed like an exhausted wave. He studied an abandoned lobster pot on the windowsill of a deserted shed without a roof, and beyond that, a yard of collapsed and grinning galvanize. Gulls wheeled by, then scald crows started up, and for one brief inconclusive second he realized that birds never look at each other while they fly, nor when they sit on telegraph wires, not even when they perch in a cage. This he thought was something to ponder on.

  He told this to Sara.

  She said: “I never like to see someone who cannot look you in the eye.”

  The window of the study came down. “Teehaw,” said the Sergeant using Sara’s pet name, “leave Mr O’Muichin alone, and be off with you.”

  “She’s all right, Mr Adams,” said the Irish speaker, and then in a nervous fashion – some creature had tightened his bodice again – he took a walk up the peninsula.

  In Belmullet the Dublin Jackeen was an object of great curiosity, as was the man before him, but O’Muichin even more so, since he did not fraternize. Nor did he relish at all the interest taken in him. He was a man constantly looking for an escape. To disappear. Become transparent. The people had a name for that, which translated means “head of straw”. On his toes he leaned over to look at the water. He felt the rim of the old bridge with his hands and stood there for a while.

  “When they build the new one they should make it so it opens to let boats through,” said an old fellow beside him. “Then you’d be able to travel right round the peninsula by water.”

  O’Muichin snapped the notebook out of his pocket and jotted something down. He took another step towards the house, then stopped again to write. The spell was broken. He felt benign. The notebook came out, the thought was dismissed, he walked on. Catherine appeared. His walk eventually took them to a beach and Catherine accompanied him. First at a distance, then alongside.

  There was an infinitesimal seam in her black stockings. She was a tall young woman in a grey, shapeless jumper. Lean, athletic, sure-footed. Black skirt, black slippers. The blond hair that fell into her eyes was kicked out behind. “God is good,” said O’Muichin. “He sent me you.” Catherine was glad that O’Muichin had cheered up. They talked of the disparity between different places, of things happening in different places simultaneously. Stepping over a stream there was the sensation of one hand letting the other hand go. Pure-wool clouds floated in a crevice of the mountains on Achill. Then a sudden squall.

  “County Mayo,” said Catherine.

  “That’s right,” said O’Muichin. “And what are you going to be?”

  “An actress,” said Catherine.

  “Well,” said he, “you have a beautiful speaking voice.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She reached over and kissed her teacher’s cheek. A furious barking began. The two of them had to stand on a stone wall to avoid a cross dog until a boy, who appeared out of
a nearby house, called him away.

  “C’mon away you fucker, you,” shouted the boy. “And the fucker isn’t even ours. Ga lang out-a-that. Look at the head on him,” he shouted. “Come up out of there. Go on!” Still shouting at the dog, the boy passed out of sight. And again O’Muichin took his notebook out of his pocket and jotted down in a terse style all he had seen and heard.

  The following week O’Muichin passed on to the Irish for trees, but it was obvious that he was learning more from the girls than they were from him. He was learning a Northern language that was archaic. Like Jack Ferris long after him, he listened in awe to their succinct vocabulary that had about it an eroticism, a seduction, a wry humour, and a strange undertone of despair. And he was aware all the time that he must not succumb. As the days passed he became a strange bird. The notebook was never out of his hand, then he’d break out into long, abstract speeches, the gist being that the girls should keep diaries of their lives, for he felt that they had a gift greater than his, and he did not mind admitting it.

  But he could not get them to be serious.

  “We’re not that foolish,” replied Sara, “to write down what we really think.”

  “We’re only passing through,” said Catherine, though his would be the first name that would go into her book.

  “My trouble is I wrote a book in Irish. In Irish it was spare and true. Now they want it in English, and in English I’ve added things I’ve never seen.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Catherine.

  “It’s this,” explained O’Muichin. “You pair have entered my story. I’ll be stuck with you for ever.” Then he quoted Kafka:

  ‘You see – left to my own resources I should have long ago been lost.’”

  Then their minds and bodies wandered apart so that he could make nothing of the girls. And because his own life felt like a fiction, these real people, real women, recalled O’Muichin to a physical and mental state of wellbeing he had rarely experienced. He watched a cow asleep, that was not asleep, for a moment later she flicked her tail, rose her head and looked over a wall topped with sweet broom. The wind gave a number of highly fraught hums. There were dogs asleep on a doorstep, not asleep. He looked into the worried, querying eyes of an ass, eyes affected with self-pity, as if the ass were approaching a fairly aggressive customer that she would fain be nervous of, but secretly despised. The despising was in the ass’s bone-shattering roar; and in the aftermath was the journey back into subservience again.

  “Did you ever,” asked Catherine, “when you were half-way through writing a book find that you’d taken a wrong direction?”

  “Touch wood,” he replied.

  So ended the lessons on trees. And in such a state of mind O’Muichin approached his final evening in the Adams’ house.

  The Sergeant wished to pay him, after supper was over, his two weeks’ wages.

  “Half of that will do,” said O’Muichin. “I’ve been having a holiday.”

  But Mr Adams pressed the money upon him. It was the first time he had touched the old man and he found to his surprise a sort of elegant strength travel down Jonathan Adams’ arm into his hand.

  “I hope your fantasies do well,” he said.

  “Thank you,” the teacher said.

  At the dance that night all reticence left O’Muichin. He danced with one of the sisters, and then the other, with practised steps learned in a hall in Parnell Square. “You should go there. I go there every Thursday night,” he said, while he avoided as best he could the wilder antics of the lads, for O’Muichin was a resourceful and patient man and knew that a stranger there was an object of male contempt. He slipped away before the dance was over, skimmed through a version of the tale of Maire Rua and was already in bed with his candle burning and his personal sense of euphoria established, before the girls, set on a long conversation, got home. The next morning he was sad to be leaving. He hung about the house. He let the morning bus go. Then it was too late to bike it down to Castlebar in time for the train. He was up and down from his room finding things he had left behind. His voice was heavy and he was shaking somewhat in the manner of a man possessed of a religious hangover. The girls were entranced by his romantic needs. He drank innumerable cups of tea. And then, when they were left alone in the kitchen, he let his hands rest lightly on the back of Catherine’s head.

  “Let me see now,” he said, “if we have any fleas.”

  He sifted and nit-picked her hair with his fingers.

  “Well, well,” he said, sucking in in mock surprise.

  “Did you find some?” she asked.

  “Hold on now,” he answered, “I think they’ve gone down the back of your dress.”

  “Do you think so?” said Catherine looking at Sara, and then she threw up her eyes in the joy of conspiracy.

  “A bad case, I’m afraid.” He shook his head.

  The next thing he was tickling her under the arms and she fell to the floor laughing and screaming, and O’Muichin flailing after her. Then Sara jumped on top of him. Maisie Adams came in. Uncomfortably, the Irish speaker picked himself off the floor. “Sara Adams,” her mother ordered, “get up.” O’Muichin tried to speak and the girls laughed. Maisie Adams turned her back, her shoulders shaking with mirth.

  “Are you respectable, Mr O’Muichin?” she asked.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” he meekly whispered.

  “Still here, O’Muichin?” the Sergeant called as he entered the kitchen. The teacher reluctantly said goodbye, took his blue bag by the strap, put it on his back, and turned towards Belmullet. He stopped once to wave, then cycled on till he reached Maumaratta, the Mountain Pass of the Young Hares. There he passed the night in a sleeping bag among the airy stones.

  16

  The Salmon of Knowledge

  Sergeant Adams succumbed to an illness in Fermanagh the following spring. The results of the tests were not good. He was removed to hospital, and three weeks later when he knew he was not going to get any better he asked to be moved to the light-keepers’ house in Mullet. Maisie phoned Willy his brother to drive them down. The geese were farmed out to a neighbour. The girls were given leave from school. Willy, who they had not seen in years, thought the decision to go South was disastrous. But Jonathan was adamant.

  Willy drove them to the west of Ireland, where he had never been, in the Adams’ car, then immediately returned by public transport. It was a hard and treacherous spring, with gales hammering against the coastline. The dunes blew. Wrack was piled up in the fields. Foam from a blowhole rose over Aghadoon. The women stocked up with food. Joe Love and Bernie Burke came with coal and turf. They lit huge fires. A local nurse was employed. Jonathan Adams was scandalized to find a Catholic attending him. He asked to have her removed. But next morning she was there again. She walked him to the toilet and stood outside.

  “All right, Mr Adams?” she’d call.

  “Yes, yes,” he’d reply angrily.

  She injected him morning and evening with morphine. He’d wake up cold in the bed and see her, a human object in the coldness, wishing him good morning from midway across the room.

  “Are you still here?”

  “Yes. And so are you.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Time to wash.”

  “I don’t want to wash.”

  “You must wash. We don’t want the infection spreading, do we now, Mr Adams?”

  Reluctantly he’d offer one limp hand then the other. As she wiped his face he shivered with frustration. She had a habit of hugging him to her that he found distasteful. To do the back of his neck she pressed his face into her shoulder. He sat on the edge of the bed, his chin on her shoulder, looking helplessly towards the door of the bedroom as she towelled his back.

  “All right, Mr Adams?”

  “Yes,” he hissed.

  “It will all be over in a moment.” She sprayed the room. Polished his bedside table. Ran the hoover round his bed. Emptied disinfectant into the toilet.

&nbs
p; “Now, Mr Adams. Your daughters are here to see you.”

  The girls came and sat by his bed.

  “Ask in the travelling library for something on water. Something with tall print,” he asked.

  Laid out in his sick bed, while the Atlantic winds howled from the northwest, Jonathan Adams read of the beginning of the great rivers of Ireland from a schoolbook propped on his chest. Knocking sounds came from all sides. The house shook underwater. He got so bad that a doctor was sent for. None from the locality could be found. Then Nurse Noone appeared with a Doctor Ferris who was visiting relations on the peninsula. When he sat down by the bed the stench of whiskey overwhelmed Jonathan Adams.

  “Dear God,” he said.

  The doctor lifted the old policeman’s hand and checked his pulse. “Dreadful weather,” he said. He dropped the thin wrist and opened his bag. “We better increase the dose,” he said. He handed the small bottles of morphine to the nurse. He leaned over the dying man and looked into his eyes.

  “I wish you luck,” he said.

  “Maisie,” called Jonathan Adams. “Is he gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t move so fast around the room,” he told the girls.

  Up till the last he attended to his own toilet, even after the nurse tried getting him to pee into a steel bedpan. He’d slide out of bed, feel his way along the iron railing, the armchair, the bannisters. “Yes, yes,” he’d say through the closed door of the new bathroom to Nurse Noone. Then he’d stand a moment on the stairs like a sleepwalker. Enter the room and bow his head while the nurse, chatting the whole time, tidied his bed. With great distress he heard the bag, that had been attached to his stomach after the operation in Enniskillen, make loud farting noises. He closed his eyes in embarrassment. As he grew sicker, his skin took on a deep tan as if he had been abroad on holiday, and the whites of his eyes grew remarkably white. Red weals, like a whiskey drinker’s, appeared on his cheeks. He lifted the schoolbook again, but since the doctor increased the morphine, he found he was unable to read. So Nurse Eitne Noone read to him, and after her, Sara, Catherine, and then Maisie.