by Dermot Healy
“I know.”
“Aye, but who could blame them? There’s nothing wrong with having a good time.”
The two men stepped on through the night.
“The things I could tell you,” said Fintan Carmichael.
“Work away,” said Jack.
“Oh, if you only knew all the men those ladies have lain with! Isn’t it a terror! The Protestant girls are way ahead of us,” Fintan declaimed. A tickle entered his throat. He grew excited. “A man like you,” he told Jack, “should watch his p’s and q’s. Oh Lord, but they’re wild women. Certainly,” said Fintan. “The Protestant girl,” he blew out loudly, “would make you cross the yard.”
“So that’s how it is.”
“That’s how it is. Women generally,” declared Fintan, “have no shame.”
They reached the fire on Annagh Head. A crowd were sitting round drinking and singing. Some lay fast asleep a few yards away from the flames. A woman was playing a guitar with four strings. Fintan and Jack sat down. Across the fields came two lads driving before them a tractor wheel. They pushed it into the fire. Sparks flew up. The smell of burning rubber spread.
“Come here a minute,” said Fintan.
He unearthed a half-bottle of Paddy whiskey and they stood on a rock and drank it while they looked at the flames.
In a field some distance away they found a goat. Jack stood by the gate while Fintan scoured the field in the wake of the nanny. “Get up, ya boy ya,” shouted Fintan. A few minutes later he emerged driving the white nanny in front of him. They tied the animal with the rope that held the gate in place, then led her up the road to Corrloch.
“We’ll show them,” said Fintan.
Dawn was breaking. The fires had disappeared. The goat kept a steady, reliable pace. The two walked laughing behind her. “If we meet anyone, we’re disgraced,” said Fintan. When they got to the Adams’ house it was in darkness. They listened a while behind the gate-piers.
Then Fintan coaxed the goat forward, while Jack tied the rope that held her to the knocker. They withdrew quietly down the path, hid behind the stone wall, and Fintan called the goat.
“Billy,” he whispered.
The creature stood perfectly still, adjusting the coracle-shaped pupils of its eyes. Then she lay down on the step.
“Cynthia,” he whispered louder.
The goat did not budge.
Jack threw a handful of gravel and the goat shook herself. She got up and reached forward to pluck at some grass. “Jesus,” said Jack. The men, shaking with mirth, waited. The knocker sounded. “Again,” said Fintan, with his teeth bared. The goat pulled strongly. The knocker went rat-a-tat. The lights came on. Someone opened the hall door and the rope round the goat went taut. The nanny was pulled inwards as the door opened wider. Catherine was standing there in a man’s long white shirt. With her head tilted down in disbelief she stared dumbfounded at the pink ears of the white beast on her doorstep.
When she woke the next morning Catherine was astonished to find the goat was still there eating grass in the garden. She went down and looked into the nanny goat’s eye. Its udders shook like bell-ropes. The trim neck was graceful. The gaze ladylike. It was a shock to find the animal staring up at her. The green pupils of its eyes wavered and floated like flakes of snow. The act of seeing seemed to have detached the irises. Her hair was human and white. The gaze ancient.
Beyond the glass eye of the goat Catherine saw a fresh uncivilized place. She watched the startlingly pure, gentle look of the womanly goat.
“And how did you come here, pray?” Catherine asked. She let her out of the gate and watched her stroll off into the sunshine.
20
The Illustrated Sons of Ireland
The summer after she took her degree Catherine came down to the Mullet alone. She took a walk on the beach. Away in the distance she saw another windblown figure approaching her. The figure would stop, bend, go on again. For ages and ages they headed slowly towards each other. Eventually she saw it was a wild-looking man with a plastic refuse sack who was collecting timber from the wrack. At last they reached each other.
He was wearing a duffle-coat and no shirt.
“How are you!” she shouted.
“I’m alive, I think,” he yelled. “Where are you from?”
“Belfast.”
“Do they have wind up there?”
“Sometimes,” she shouted, taken aback.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he yelled, “I thought there might be some place on this godforsaken earth that the wind would leave untouched.” And at that he moved on, as did she. At a local pub she enquired where Jack Ferris lived. “He stops above in Thady’s,” she was told. She touched up her face in the toilet mirror and then looked into her eyes for a while.
She walked through the gaeltacht area with the same mixture of feelings that would unnerve her as she’d stride through West Belfast.
Smoke spiralled from the chimneys. The men unashamedly viewed her as she stepped through the small cottages. They turned aside and called out flat, timid greetings, which she answered nervously. She reached the lane that the barman had marked on the map he’d drawn for her. She was met by a blast of wild wind which flew up between the narrow ditches. Fresh cowpats steamed on the grass. A race of warm water ran to her left. She stole curiously down.
A few stunted oleria, whipped inland, announced the low, galvanize-roofed, whitewashed, three-roomed cottage. The first little window she came to she looked in and saw two beds pulled over at angles to a roaring fireplace. Trousers and shirts hung from a cord above the mantel. In the middle room, the remains of a breakfast sat on the kitchen table. Yellow plastic fishing gear was strewn on the floor. Under a window on the far side a bicycle sat upside down on its handlebars and saddle, and beside it, two uncocked rifles rested against the sill. In the third room, lined with books, a huge old-fashioned typewriter, big as a tractor, sat on a green table. She withdrew, knocked and turned away.
“Come in, Josie,” a strange voice called.
“It’s me, Catherine.”
“What?” shouted Jack.
“Catherine Adams,” she said.
“Jesus,” she heard him say.
She pushed the door in. She walked on towards the far room where Jack was sitting on the side of one of the beds in his underpants.
“Come in, Missus,” said Thady, as he looked round the headboard of the other bed. The room was filled with the dry, animal smell of bachelors, the sharp tang of fish and the hissing of wet turf. Jack, white-faced, with a head of uncombed curly black hair, started to pull on a pair of trousers he’d taken down from the line. “Don’t,” she said, “if they’re still wet.”
“We got a terrible drenching this morning,” Jack said.
“And fuck all for it,” said Thady.
“Stop where you are,” said Catherine.
She sat to the right of the hearth under a picture of the Jesse James gang, and a copy of Emmet’s speech from the dock that had yellowed with age.
“So this is home?” said Catherine.
“That’s right,” said Jack, “and this is Uncle Thady.”
“How do you do?” he said, and she took his hand.
On a further wall was a huge framed picture of a group of grey Victorian men standing one behind the other in riding boots and buckled shoes with high heels. Each man wore a bow and wig. The faces looked like they had been added on to the identical bodies afterwards. The picture looked totally out of place on the bare rounded wall.
“Who are these persons?” Catherine asked.
“‘The Illustrated Sons of Ireland’ they call themselves,” said Thady, “I picked that up in a junk shop in Longford town.”
“They look like figures in an old English cartoon.”
“That’s exactly what they were, Missus,” agreed Thady. “Lads in a cartoon. Irishmen abroad.”
“And no women,” said Catherine.
“No, the women were away that day,�
�� laughed Thady.
“Major General Patrick Sarsfield,” Catherine read.
“A cannon ball put paid to his skull,” said Thady.
“Oliver Plunkett.”
“Drawn and quartered.”
“John Philpot Curran. Hugh O’Neill.”
“The man himself!”
“Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Moore. Archbishop McHale. Father Matthew.”
“The less said the better.”
“Wolfe Tone.”
“A Presbyterian, wouldn’t you know. And a Republican.”
“Daniel O’Connell.”
“A Catholic.”
“Edmund Burke.”
“A relation of Conor Cruise O’Brien,” said Jack.
“Robert Emmet.”
“He should have waited.”
“Richard Lawlor Shield. Henry Grattan. Gerald Griffin.”
“A clerk.”
“William Smith O’Brien.”
“A Labour man.”
“Reverend Father Burke, O.P. John Mitchell.”
“That would be the author of A Jail Journal,” Thady said. “A mighty man. Did his time in Australia and went straight to the top in America. There you have the whole shebang.”
“And you know them all.”
“And why wouldn’t I? If there’d only been that crew alone, there’d have been no need for the rest of us.” He coughed. “When you hear it all in one breath it’s hard to take in. And then it means nothing. Nothing at all.”
“It’s cool,” said Thady, sitting up.
“Who’s Josie?” asked Catherine.
“Ah, poor Josie Drum,” said Thady. “She should be up there too, among ‘The Illustrated’. The man above put a fierce cross on Josie – he told her to carry on.”
“If I’d known you were coming,” said Jack, and he pulled the sheet to his chin.
“But is there a man above at all?” continued Thady.
The two cats on the hearth, with high hips and long hind legs, ran when she attempted to pet them, and skulked together in slow motion at the door.
“You’re welcome anyway,” Thady told her. He rose a small face filled with mean humour and brown, racy eyes. “You’ll find glasses and a cup there behind you.” Then he pointed towards the fire. “There’s custard there in a pot, too.”
She looked at Jack. In his vest he had the thin hooped shoulders of a young boy.
“Why don’t you bring me out fishing with you someday?”
“You wouldn’t like it,” said Jack.
“I won’t know till I see for myself.”
“Do you see,” Thady pointed, “do you see there on the sill there’s a bottle.” As Thady poured a dram of crystal poitín into his cup, Catherine looked at Jack, and Jack looked at her. Catherine was a woman to tie scarves about herself, her shoulders, her neck, her head. Even, at times, round her wrist. The fire whooshed and changed direction.
“The custard,” explained Thady, “is for the cats.”
He leaned forward to pour a drop of poitín into her glass. It smelt sharp and medicinal. He caught her eye with his and gave a grin. “He’s not the only man, is Jack, to have a lady come to see him.”
“No?”
“No. I have a girlfriend in America got married, had children, don’t you know. And now that she’s lost her husband she says she’ll be back for me.” He drank a mouthful, held it awhile, then swallowed it. “And I put a new roof on the house, here, for the very day.”
“You should not,” said Catherine, with a straight face, “have built a cage before you trapped the bird.”
“If I,” said Thady, “was a few years younger, this boy here” – and he pointed at his loins – “would be in there” – and he pointed at hers.
This absurd male fantasy made Catherine burst out laughing, and along with her, the men laughed uproariously.
“I’m not supposed to laugh at comments like those,” she said.
“Indeed you’re not,” agreed Thady.
Catherine smelt her glass and tasted the rim. She arched her foot, gave a loose-breasted laugh, and flexed her leg. She drank, then drank again.
“When did you come down?” asked Jack.
“This morning,” she said as she read the fire.
“So you’re by yourself,” he said guardedly.
“Oh, I have plenty of company.”
The loose gutter in the east gable pounded, then rain struck the windows and battered the galvanize. Thady lifted his hand to his eyes and yawned. Then, incongruously, farted.
“It’s the breakfast,” he apologized.
“You should try baby food,” said Catherine, and then she added, “and you could administer it to yourself with a spoon.”
“Glory be!” said Thady. “Is that the recipe?”
The cats returned and leapt onto the two beds in which the men lay, and nestling, looked across at each other as they stretched stiff paws. There was no sound when the wind died away except the rain hitting the flames and the drip now and then from the steaming clothes. Catherine felt a draught blow round her groin. She drew her kilt tighter about her. The pin flashed. Thady broke into a fit of coughing, spat somewhere and said: “That’ll be the size of it.”
“I have you now,” said Catherine.
“You have what?” asked Jack.
“What you look like,” and she laughed. “You look like a vole.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a sort of a small rodent.”
“That,” said Thady, “don’t you know, would be a class of a rat.”
“It must be three years since I’ve seen you.”
“That’s right.”
“The last time I was here I woke to find a goat tied to our door,” said Catherine. Jack chuckled. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“The gentleman goat,” mused Thady, “is a rascal. He can disgrace himself. He’ll tip his head and drink his own urine.”
“Is that so?”
“Oh, yes, the blaggard.”
She threw some turf on the fire. Thady’s black eyebrows rose, and his tongue darted out. “Yes,” he said, “keep her going,” and he reached out for the bottle. He filled their glasses, then his cup. “I spend my last penny – the bit I have – on this,” he said. He drank with a series of dislocated movements of the face and hands, squinted, feinted, then bared his teeth, and finally, with a shake of the head, clapped his lips together again.
Silence returned. The wind shifted.
“You tied that goat to our door,” she said.
“I did,” said Jack.
“Whatever for?”
“It’s the Leitrim twist of mind, Missus,” said Thady. “They got scholarship in Leitrim.”
“That’s lovely,” said Catherine.
“We are only passing the time, tá,” said Thady.
“It often seems to me that I am only indulging myself.” Catherine was thinking aloud. She offered her glass. “And I often feel that I couldn’t care if I never saw anyone again.”
“You should not say that,” said Jack.
“A woman can say these things,” Thady declared. He refilled her glass. “I think, will you excuse me, that I have to go to the toilet.”
He put his bare feet into his shoes, pulled a coat about him and perched for a second, heron-like, at the open door, looked out to sea, then with an exaggerated blink he went to the side of the house.
“This is all very civilized,” said Catherine.
“I’m glad to see you,” said Jack.
“This,” she said looking at her glass, “is wonderful stuff.”
Thady returned to the room and stood by the bed again with humorous shakes of the elbow, a small giddiness of the heel, and rose his goat’s brows, then his arms jigged the reins. Turning his shoulder blades like the obsolete wheels of a cart, Thady climbed into bed. Catherine stood up and went to the window. She rested her glass on the sill, sat on the further edge of Jack’s bed and looke
d out.
“The islands,” said Jack, “are in a different place every day.”
She watched the big shadowy sea. Men in oilskins torn at the thigh and the groin were standing on a table of rock against which the waves broke with a death rattle. Her body darkened the room. Silently, to the right, on the beach the water crackled across the sand, then fizzled out. For a long time she looked out till eventually she said, “It seems to me that the islands are leaving.”
Jack looked over her shoulder.
It became so clear that things not seen before came into view. Each stone on the beach seemed mere feet away. Cottages suddenly appeared. The sky was windy and blue, the earth white.
“You are right,” he said.
The dog began barking.
“That must be Josie, now,” said Jack.
Standing up, Catherine had to support herself against the wall.
“I think I’ll go,” she said.
“Wait,” cried Jack, “I’ll go with you.” And he pulled the bedclothes back.
“No,” she said stubbornly, “the fresh air will do me good.”
“If you want to go fishing with us,” said Thady, “how does tomorrow morning at six strike you?”
“That’s an unearthly hour.”
“We have to catch the tide,” said Jack.
“Take care, Missus,” Thady called after her.
When she stepped into the yard she felt her head going round. A small woman was coming down the lane talking to herself. The dog was running between the two women. The woman had a buttered face and ginger-stick eyebrows, huge lips and a tumbling fast stride. She was excusing herself for some misdemeanour.
Then, seeing Catherine, she said: “I beg your pardon.”
“Hallo,” said Catherine.
“Where did you get the beautiful eyes? And the beautiful hair?” Josie asked. “Some people are blessed.” Then, looking at Catherine carefully she added: “Yous have been at the bottle.”
“I’m afraid I have.”
“Will you be all right, love?”
“Yes,” said Catherine, blushing because she felt so tall.
“I’m sure,” said Josie, “that you can talk with the best of them,” and she trod on by. The moon, like a scooped out melon, was casting a wide ring that would someday soon be full. Bewildered, and breathless, intoxicated, she ran. She stopped on the white shimmering road. Fog from the steaming sea was rushing inland as evening fell. She walked through the fast mist. Birds had collected on their hunkers to the left of the pier. Here, they crouched out of the wind. She could nearly feel the soft breasts of the seagulls in the damp sand. She could feel her own coat, her cold lips, her lust, her cheeks, and the warmth of her armpits.