A Goat's Song

by Dermot Healy

“And you are much too old for her.”

  “Oh,” he replied. “Too old for what?”

  “You know yourself.”

  “I get the implication, but you’re wrong.”

  “So that was not you,” she answered self-righteously, “sitting outside our house night after night in the car?”

  “Not me, unfortunately.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked incredulously.

  “I am,” he answered. “I think you have the wrong man.”

  They sat in silence while she recalled all her perverse imaginings and he laced a shoe that did not need lacing.

  “It’s extraordinary,” she suddenly said.

  “The whole thing is a wonder,” agreed Jack. He shook his head, brought up his bottom lip and attempted an unexpected, friendly smile. “I hardly know Sara. All I did was teach her to drive.”

  “Then why do you still call?”

  “Because I know so few.” He acknowledged the shelf behind her with a nod. “You have a sight of books.”

  “They were my father’s,” she replied absent-mindedly.

  He looked at her. She gave him the same candid, interested glance. “I was just passing,” he explained.

  “What do you do anyway?” she asked.

  “I do a spot of writing. And I fish here for the summer on the boats.”

  This made her pause. “Writing,” she said disbelievingly. “What sort of writing?”

  “Plays, I’m interested in plays.”

  “What kind?”

  “I pen songs of the buck. Billy tunes.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Goat songs.”

  “Is that so?”

  “That’d be the height of it.”

  Catherine looked at him. “That’s all very interesting. But I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Tragedies. Tragos – goat. Oide – song. From the Greek.”

  “I never knew that.”

  “There you go. Every time you weep in the theatre you’re listening to a goat singing.”

  “You jest.”

  “Not at all. In the early days the Greek goatherds used to put the bucks on one island and the nannies on another. Then when the nannies were on heat their smell would come on the breeze to the bucks who rose a mournful cry.”

  “The poor things.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “And why didn’t they just jump in the water and swim across, if they were so frustrated?”

  “Ah, but that’s the crux of the matter,” said Jack Ferris. “You see, goats can’t swim.”

  Suddenly, there was a loud crash against the door and a low whine. “Be God,” said Jack Ferris. “That’s me dog.”

  “Well, bring him in.”

  “Are you serious?” He watched her carefully as he ushered in a tangerine shepherd dog, which immediately rushed under the seat Jack sat on and looked out at Catherine through his master’s legs.

  “I’ve no luck with dogs. This one is a pup I bought from a home. He’s called” – he looked down at the quivering snout of the animal – “he’s called, to his great grief, Daisy, aren’t you?”

  The dog rubbed his back against the underneath of the chair. Jack’s touch set Daisy’s right rear leg into a state of uncontrollable pleasure. It slapped the cement floor like a drumstick. The dog could not stop himself, went to dart out, withdrew and collapsed.

  “Poor Daisy. Daisy,” lilted Catherine, “what an unfortunate name for a dog.” She returned her gaze to him. “Where do you come from?”

  “To my great grief,” replied Jack, “I come from Kilty in the County Leitrim.”

  “The dogs in Roscommon,” commenced Jack Ferris as he considered Daisy, “have different-coloured eyes. One brown, one blue. It’s hard to credit it. How do you think that happened?”

  “I couldn’t say,” answered Catherine.

  “In Leitrim there’s a fair few have a twist in the eye, and there’s another few albino.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Of course,” surmised Jack Ferris, “the shepherd dog as we know him is not the shepherd dog.”

  “No?”

  “Indeed, he’s not the collie at all.”

  “Really?” She felt her cheek. “How interesting.”

  “I always had a knack with animals,” Jack continued, bracing himself, “but never dogs. I always had a fancy towards horses and cattle, right enough,” he agreed. “And sheep, maybe. You don’t find many instances of the disturbed pupil there.” He tapped a fag into the palm of his hand. “The same horse is very scarce where I come from. Do you read the books?”

  “No. All I do is look at the pictures.”

  “Somebody’s codding somebody,” said Jack, emptying the ash into the fire, “I suppose you were all contrary children.”

  “I suppose we were.”

  “And Sara is off to the Abbey Theatre to act, I believe.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s all go.” He heard her mother cough as she crossed the landing upstairs. “What ails your ma?”

  “She has congestion of the lungs. She says it’s like someone sitting on her chest.”

  “Give her goat’s milk,” he said.

  “Goat’s milk,” repeated Catherine, and immediately she remembered Matti Bonner. “Have you had plays put on?”

  “A few,” he said.

  Silence fell on them. Daisy made his way out, looked around the room, licked the floor with a very tentative, wet tongue and then tried to bury his head in Catherine’s groin. “Get down, you cur,” said Jack. “He is always saddle-sniffing.” The dog climbed back in underneath Jack’s chair, then, much to Catherine’s distraction, licked at its private parts and, finished with that, began instantly dreaming.

  Jack Ferris walked off swinging his boots. He made his way to a low field, partly flooded, dotted with rocks at both sides and patches of heather. There was only one set of goalposts, at the further end, the other posts had crashed to the ground, and through where the goal once stood swans glided. He knelt, pulled his togs up over his trousers, put on the boots, stuffed his trousers into his football socks, then, sitting into a ditch, pulled out a cigarette and waited. Then he began saying to himself in a distracted fashion, altering the rhythms as he chose, changing the emphasis, scattering the feet, a certain phrase he had heard a man from Inishmaan bellow out on Inisheer as he stumbled drunkenly home:

  I am the greatest man in Ballyconeely

  I am the greatest man in Ballyconeely

  and so on, in a traditional self-deprecating way.

  The morning after the storm the sky was black. She cycled up to Glenlara. A few villagers were gathered at the cliffs which gave an exaggerated view of the horizon. She walked up the last stretch to join them. Plaid waves broke as far as the eye could see. The salmon boats were speeding out one after the other. A single dull light burned on the horizon. The high tide had scattered debris as far as the road.

  The people stood, looking out, in silence. The gaps in the walls shone like mirrors reflecting the blue-black sky. The earth felt dangerous.

  To her left, the sea spilled across the small slipway. There was a heart-stopping crack of thunder from the waves. A fall of rain blew in. She felt light-headed and afraid. She stepped into a hollow on the down-wind side of the rocks where the last of the flowering sea-thrift grew in small pink clumps. The weight of the low cliffs was over her head. The land was made of stone, and each stone was neatly packaged away on beds of slate. And on each slate a record of straight lines and broken lines was kept – of distances, of levels, of the sea and its booms, and gravel blown up.

  Now the shore was filled with giant rocks that had been blown in by the storm. They rested unsteadily there, waiting to be carried in. She watched them, amazed by the power of the sea.

  A guard cycled up and joined the others above. He smoked cigarette after cigarette. More light rain fell. Gulls shrieked. Then suddenly the sun, blazing white, appea
red. With great wonder Catherine saw the Glenlara folk fill up with hallucinatory light. Over the big shadowy sea the sun worked a chisel through the clouds. It slanted purple, then red, then orange.

  A boat broke the water in a pool of sunlight. It lifted on one broad stroke above a bright wave, breathed there a moment, dipped and disappeared. A cheer went up from the crowd. The sight of her plunging on the horizon reassured the onlookers that she was making headway. An old man standing next to Catherine said: “There’s nothing more beautiful. To be up at five in the morning, dawn breaking, and nothing else but the tick a’da engine in the background.”

  “What’s happened?” she asked.

  “An East German boat was in trouble out there somewhere, but they’re safe now,” he said. They walked back up the road pushing their bikes. They reached a tall hedge that stood incongruous among the bare windswept fields. “Whisht!” he said. They stood in silence listening. “Can you hear them?” They both listened. “Them’s the pigeons of the Coyle brothers. Can you hear them?” He stood on his toes with delight. “They keep hundreds in cages within.”

  They stood on the road beside a massive shelter of oleria, escallonia, cordyline palms, griselinia, bamboos, New Zealand flax, mimosa, sycamore, and listened to the miraculous sound of pigeons and doves and guinea hens in a countryside where there are no trees.

  In compliance with the cure, Maisie began a daily diet of goat’s milk and goat’s cheese that the two girls bought from some German hippies living on the mainland. Some days later she appeared in the kitchen.

  “I think I’ve passed the badness,” Maisie reckoned.

  She pronounced herself cured. There was nothing wrong with her at all. There never was. All that summer she had lain in bed, afflicted by nightmares to do with the North. Now she came down in the afternoons, and clucked about the kitchen with such distressing haste that she missed everything she reached for by a fraction. She cooked, some evenings, dishes of extraordinary simplicity: bread-puddings, jam tarts, herring pie. The old Maisie was back.

  Time would blow coldly into the room, make Maisie turn, and tip a spoon to her mouth and send her miles away.

  She came down eventually, every day, all day, and sewed throughout the mornings, blinked fiercely at her patterns and commenced remembering her years as a cook with Lord Brookborough.

  It was true, Maisie did look better.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’ve passed the badness. I’m not helpless.” She wiped dust off the photographs of the elderly smiling masons grouped confidently in some wooden Tyrone hall. Her husband, spruce and adroit, beamed at the camera from the back row. He looked older, from a different generation, compared to her. She blew on the silver spoons, and handed each sherry glass to Catherine to hold to the light and see if any specks remained.

  “I don’t know what came over me at all,” she said, and shook her head, baffled, disbelieving, and a little pale.

  The next time Jack called it was raining, so Catherine ushered him in, and without embarrassment he greeted Mrs Adams, who was sitting in a thick cotton nightdress by the fire.

  “I think it’s Jack,” Catherine said.

  “Jack Ferris,” he agreed.

  “What side of the house are you?” her mother asked.

  “Catholic, oh my dear.”

  “It’s not your fault,” said Maisie, and she laughed and added: “Once you have your health.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sit down, Jack,” gestured Catherine.

  “That’s a bad night,” he nodded.

  “So, you are the writer,” Maisie viewed him, “that’s been chasing our Sara.”

  Jack looked at Catherine uneasily. The large parcel he was carrying he rested on the floor.

  “Where’s Daisy tonight?” asked Catherine, helpfully.

  “He’s about.”

  “I shouldn’t bother myself over our Sara if I was you,” advised Mrs Adams. “Our Sara has ambitions. She’s off to become famous.”

  “So I heard.”

  “A Catholic man,” explained Maisie to her daughter, “always appears easy going.”

  “We have our problems, too,” he said.

  And Maisie replied: “I don’t doubt it. I fell for one myself once upon a time.”

  “Did it not work out?”

  “I think he got himself in trouble. One day he wasn’t there any more.”

  “That will happen too.”

  They laughed scandalously, Catherine realized, like people that had known each other for a long time.

  “So I suppose,” he enquired smiling, “marriage is out of the question.”

  “I think you’d be barking up the wrong tree there,” said Maisie laughing merrily. “My daughters like to keep their options open.”

  Maisie leaned a little confidentially towards him. She peered unashamedly at his face. “Look, Cathy, at the lovely curly black hair he has.”

  “Aye,” said Jack, “and eyelashes, I’m told, that a woman would be proud of.”

  “Hark,” said Maisie, “at the modesty of that. A true Irishman.”

  In reply, Jack moved his parcel again.

  “All right,” said Catherine, “out with it.”

  “What?” he spoke gruffly, hoisting an eye in her direction.

  “What’s in the parcel?”

  “Oh, that,” the inflexion was casual. “Oh, that’s something I brought for the house here.”

  “Now,” chuckled Maisie.

  He made Catherine gently lift the parcel onto the table. “Careful,” he said. She undid the string that held the newspaper. Then, still in its wrapping, she lifted the unknown object out of the cardboard box. “It’s a bit rickety,” he advised. She opened the newspaper to display the glass head of an oil lamp decorated with red and blue flowers.

  “Well I never,” said Maisie. “Of all things.”

  Her bemusement rocked Jack. From the box he took a brass paraffin dome. He wound a wad of soaked wick into the grill. “Strike the lights,” said Jack, as he handed her the glass. Catherine switched off the lights. He lit a match. Catherine screwed the glass down. The wide kitchen filled with a deep rosy glow.

  “Why, it’s beautiful,” said Catherine.

  “I found two in an outhouse. I did this one up” – he hesitated – “especially. It’s a fine class of a lamp.”

  He lit a cigarette, and swished the match to and fro unnecessarily before hurling it into the grate.

  “You are a dab hand,” said Maisie. “It’s the very thing. Men have their place in the scheme of things, too.”

  Jack studied the lamp, then returned his gaze to the fire.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, crossing his legs. An air of uneasiness fell, as if they were finding themselves suddenly complete strangers to each other. The glib foreplay of language flittered out. No one knew what to say. The lamp filled the room with shadows. “Will you have tea?” asked Catherine. But Jack declined. “It’s a courting light, that,” he said. Just then, Sara came into the kitchen with her coat over her head. She shook the coat into the porch, paused, and looked round.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  “Jack brought it for us,” said Catherine. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “Jack? Jack is it, now?” she said.

  “I’m going out,” said Sara.

  “Please yourself,” Catherine answered.

  “Look, I’m going out for a while, that’s all.”

  “How?”

  “Walking.”

  “Walking where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I can’t stop you.”

  “Just try.”

  Sara buttoned up her cardigan. She looked into the mirror on the windowsill, and widened her eyes as she drew her cheeks down with her fingertips. Then she stood by the door, reluctant to leave.

  “I find you depressing,” Sara said with a tone of bizarre unexpected intimacy.

  “Where are you going?”

 
“I’ll be back early,” she pleaded, but Catherine continued brooding by the fire.

  “Are you going to meet Jack?” she asked, and her upper lip shook.

  “It’s not your concern who I’m meeting.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “If you won’t speak civilly to me, then I’m going,” Sara said.

  Catherine gave her a look of crazy, undefined envy.

  “I don’t want rancour in the house,” Catherine, white-faced, replied.

  Catherine talked to herself under her breath. Her face grew ugly when Sara was gone. She cried dispassionately. Waited for the sound of the car starting. She peered out of the curtains but the car remained unlit and untouched. Then, having reached a decision, she stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened. But she could not hear a sound except the constant shifting of the wind, and a hammering from the sea like tent-pegs being banged into the earth. She drew on a coat, pulled the door quietly behind her, and went to the gate.

  She looked into the passenger windows of the car.

  She stood, self-consciously. It was her first time out by herself at night for ages. She stepped onto the road like a sick person, unsure of her feet, uncertain of her surroundings. Sara was already half-way up the hill. Overhead, four swans, like sheets clapping in the wind, were flying across the evening sky. There was a smell of rain on stones, of coarse unhampered growth from the ditches. Tired valerian was everywhere. She allowed Sara to cross the hill and then flew after her. From the crest, Catherine saw her sister walking very slowly past the beach at Scotchport. Passing the boathouse she became a shadow on the other side of the road. Then, getting by the houses, she ran, one wrist swinging, her other hand held firmly against her stomach, and her head down.

  She turned a further corner, and doing so, stole a look behind towards the houses.

  Catherine, terrified that she might be seen, hesitated.

  But the light was fast fading. Darkness was rolling in from the sea with low, fast-moving clouds. The horizon gave off a thin sheen of electricity. Then, at a given note, all the voices of the birds stopped. Catherine wanted to turn back, hearing the mockery in Sara’s voice if she was seen. But she followed on. Three flashes of light from Eagle Island lit up the sky. Breathless, she looked down the straight road that led from the corner, but could see no sign of her sister. With an ache of the groin she thought of Sara holding Jack Ferris in her arms. The distance became a dark spot in front of her eyes till again came the swinging lights. Disappointed, she walked along uneasily. She feared that Sara was hiding from her deliberately, and half-expecting her to jump out at any minute, Catherine stopped, wondering.