That Old Country Music

by Kevin Barry

  “For another year,” she said, and let a slyness assert. “Where do you go in the mornings?”

  “I go up the Forestry,” he said. “Though I shouldn’t tell.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve been taking some wood down. I’m leaving it to dry out. September, I’ll start lugging it back to my place. You know they say it warms you three times, wood. When you cut it down, when you carry it, when you burn it.”

  “You’re thinking ahead.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’re stealing from the Forestry.”

  “They’ve plenty.”

  “What if you were caught?”

  “You’d need to be pretty stupid to be caught. It’s vast, the Forestry. It goes right from here? Right from here and over the Ox Mountains.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Edward.”

  “I think you’re a strange fish, Eddie.”

  “A cold fish was what I was, last winter. And I’m definitely not an Eddie. What’s your name?”

  * * *

  The next day they met not quite by arrangement but by understanding. This time he sat beside her under the tree. She was very tense, though she pretended not to be as she sat with her legs kicked out in front of her; she was without the pretence of a book this time. Their bodies were tight and agitated in this proximity, but each face was half turned for its glance to lock on the other’s. Sentimental grasses wavered in a lighter breeze. Autumn was moving in with stealth—early in the morning there had been stags’ roars beyond the trees. He asked about her life, and she sighed impatiently and ticked off the father and the farm, the dead mother, the older brother, William, who was away to be a doctor, the significant fact of her return soon to boarding school, and she was aware that every word signified the extent of the gap between them, in this country, at this time, and the gap would, of course, feed into his fantasies about her, which she was sure were already hot, foetid, and possessing, and now the four days until the train went back through the Midlands to her school seemed like all the time in the world to make this happen. She decided that she found him attractive enough for the job at hand. She touched him for the first time, just the pads of her fingertips to his skinny biceps—like a dog’s muscle, it twitched madly—and he rose, half terrified, his neck a rush of crimson, and made off down the river. She would need to be gentle with him.

  “Enjoy the timbering,” she called, and she may have accentuated the switching of her hips as she moved off and away from the river herself, across the pale-gold fields; he would crane for as long as he could to follow her walk, she was sure of that, until she had disappeared from view, and he would be away to masturbate immediately in the woods then—she was sure of that, too. It was as easy as making a ladybird walk up the stem of a leaf.

  That night brought a warm heavy rain that told the last heat of the year was on the way, and Thursday came up to the promised heat. She wore a skirt and applied some colour to her lips. Her father watched her as if it were a painted fox that crossed his yard. The morning was swampish and there was a rotten-vegetable stink from the ditches and the berries were dull jewels on the hedges—she wanted it to happen quickly and then to be done with the whole unfathomable business. Her lips moved, she made words on the air as she walked, saying lowly, and determinedly, “I will make…of this riverbank…a fuckery.”

  And a bead of desperation formed in the indent above the centre of her lips. She was in a condition, all the same, of vaulting readiness. The bones of her feet beat down the path to the river and there, already, the riverman was waiting. He had a face on him like a washed dog. He was quieter, shyer, and even more awkward this hot morning, knowing as well himself that the moment had arrived, even before she turned to him, midway through a ridiculous halting conversation about dragonflies peculiar to the vicinity, and kissed him so hard and viciously she might have drawn blood. They rose then from beneath the tree and went away into the reeds like animals of the place.

  She lay down on the ground and he lay down on top of her and kissed her and moved against her for a short while and then went further and there was hardly any of the supposed pain and really to the girl it just seemed badly designed, fiddly, a contrivance, a make-do job (as her father might say), and he rolled off her just in time and rose onto his knees and came on the ground. A little boy’s remorse filled up his eyes.

  “Is that about the size of it?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  There was nowhere left for them to go but into their own breathing flesh again, now that they were so quickly separated.

  * * *

  He didn’t show up by the river the following day or the next, and so on the evening before her departure she set out to find his house. She knocked on his door and let the raps play out a jaunty, half-comical rhythm.

  “Oh sweet Jesus fuck,” he said when he opened the door, and sharply he hustled her inside.

  The house was a small bungalow—it was clean and tidy and reeked of animal want. He kept his back turned to her as he filled the kettle and set it to boil. Misery was essayed everywhere, in the lentils soaking on the draining board, in the way that he tried to scour a tea mug with his index finger under the running tap—she saw his glum and mortified face in the dulling window; the evening was already fading outside, late August leaning into September.

  “It’s the sort of thing that could get me in a lot of trouble around here,” he said.

  “Who’ll know?” she said.

  He sucked his teeth and rolled a cigarette with the long, slightly crooked fingers that were the most elegant thing about him and lit the cigarette and puffed out the smoke nervously.

  “You are seventeen?” he said.

  “Not for long,” she said.

  “I don’t need a friend,” he said.

  “And I no more want tea than the fucken wall,” she said.

  When they had finished, this second and final time, and while he dozed or pretended to in the bedroom, she went through the narrow hallway and into the kitchen again; she examined his lair. There was a library book about foraging. There was the disheartening musk of adult maleness. There was a book about the bogs. There was The Sorrows of Young Werther—she had known well enough what she was doing. There was something military about the neatness. She stood in the doorway and envisioned his many possible lives and looked out to the blue night falling. Across the fields, she could hear the river moving. The river talked to itself of all that it had seen. She stood there for some time, until the blue had thickened to near-blackness, and she entered a spell of heavy dreaming or quietude such as can open out sometimes in youth if the person is to be an artist, and now the stars came through, and when she heard his wordless shuffling behind her to break the spell she walked away through the yard and did not once look back.

  * * *

  Half a term passed in the ritual frenzies of gossip and competition. She embellished gladly as she confided her late-summer adventure. She told her friends that he had looked a bit like a skinnier Rufus Wainwright and was nearly as camp. Her father made his usual Sunday night phone calls and was full of his usual quiet news, mostly about deer and his son—Oh, Willie was home the weekend, we went out; Willie got a buck, I got nothin’—but then the third week of October her father did not make his call. It was the first time ever that he had missed the call, and she knew at once why—he had got word of her adventure. She knew on the train home for midterm break that the great scene awaited but, still, to hear her father use the words he did was astonishing.

  “What would your dead mother say if she knew I’d raised up a slut?”

  “Where the fuck am I supposed to go with a question like that?”

  “And the tongue on it!”

  The quasi-biblical phrasing that had lurched in—raised up? In what demented reach of his person had
he been storing this language? The late October day was peeled and cool; the light was miserly by six, the last remnants clawed in weak scratches across the sky. She stood with her back to the piano. The room was dense with gloom. The important news was that he was gone.

  “He was ran out of it,” her father said.

  “He was ran where?”

  “He was ran!”

  “Who ran him?”

  Her father reddened dangerously and made to cross the floor but caught himself and turned his back to her. He spoke to the wall.

  “Did you protect yourself?”

  “Ah, here,” she said.

  “Did you not think it through?”

  “I did not.”

  “Did you protect yourself?”

  “Nothing happened, Da.”

  “You were seen!”

  “By fucken who! Are they hangin’ out of the fucken trees?”

  He turned and again made to cross the floor to her, but, once more, he caught himself.

  “Where’d he go to, Da?”

  “How’d I know that? Jesus Christ, girl! I mean any young fella at all your own age and I’d nearly understand it. The halfwit eejit of the Creminses even. But this aul’ English hoor? You know he’s astray in the head, you do? You know he’s been in and out of the hospital? Ten months in that place below and he paid rent twice.”

  “How was he ran, Da?”

  “We were respectable people! At one time. Around here. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Was he hurt, Daddy?”

  The lurch of fright in her voice was a sickening thing and she fled the room in disgust at it. The fright betrayed a weight of feeling that was a surprise to her. She had carried it without knowing. Though she knew well enough that it was the idea of him rather than the fact—the idea of a long, thin, sombre man, in a soak of noble depression, smelling of lentils, in a damp pebbledash bungalow, amid a scrabble of the whitethorn trees, a man ragged in the province of Connacht and alone at all seasons, perhaps already betrothed to a glamorous early death, and under some especially mischievous arrayment of the stars he was all that a girl could ask for.

  * * *

  There would have been no gothic scene. There would have been no baying mob. There would have been a rapping on the door one evening of the autumn, and quiet words spoken, and their intent understood at once. He would have packed his few things in a holdall and the next morning taken the bus from Ballymote.

  He would cross the country and the sea again. He would settle in a city of the north and try to find work and fail, and try to find a hostel and fail, and seek again the needle’s tip and solace. On the needle’s tip he would nod and dream of the Forestry land rising up to the Ox Mountains and the slight girl with dyed black hair on the riverbank there one morning.

  * * *

  She crossed the fields again as the October dark fell. She walked now beneath a cloak of widowly despair. She had arranged the picture for this scene, too. She came on his bungalow in full darkness. It had not been let again, and the door was unlocked. All had been packed away and swept neatly. His bedroom was bare, the kitchen so bare. She sat on the kitchen floor long into the night. Outside, late on, something thrashed through the whitethorn and the sally trees. She knew it was a deer, and a young one by the measure of fright in its movement. But the night folded again into the quiet of its soft enclosure. It was moonless and the great dark pressed in. She reached out for him in the dark. When she at last rose to go she was stiff from the cold and felt many years older as she left the house and made for home through the night and dark and the pads of her feet beat out the new soft rhythm of her power.

  OX MOUNTAIN DEATH SONG

  – 1 –

  He had been planting babies all over the Ox Mountains since he was seventeen years old. Well, he had the hair for it, and the ferret grin, and there was hardly a female specimen along that part of the Sligo–Mayo border that hadn’t taken the scan of his hazel glance, or hadn’t had the hard word laid on, in the dark corners of bars, or in the hormone maelstrom of the country discos, or in untaxed cars, down backroads, under the silly, silly moonlight. He had soft girlish eyelashes and pig-ignorant shoulders—sex on a stick, was his own opinion, and too many of the girls, too many of the women, shared it. He kept several on the string at any given time but as soon as they got weight on them he left them.

  Now there are those who in a lifetime cannot leave a woman—who cannot gather the strength or get past the sentiment—but Canavan left them every day.

  – 2 –

  The first time Sergeant Brown came across this latest Canavan—he was from a family a long while notorious—was in the station house, when the boy was fourteen, and had totalled a stolen Celica on the Ballymote road, and the first thing the sergeant did was hit him the slap of a phone book across the back of the head.

  “That’ll take the fucken ferret out of you,” he said, though of course it did not, and Canavan just smirked, sexily.

  The witch hazel of the eyes and the sulphur of the smirk—these betrayed to the sergeant that young Canavan would at some future point kill.

  He hit him another slap of the phone book.

  “Lose the fucken face!” he cried. “You’re nothin’ only a fucken knacker off the Ox!”

  If the regal youth felt pain it did not show. He merely flicked his blond fringe, spat a tooth, and spoke in a voice already deep-down and mannish.

  “And you’re nothin’ only a fucken swing-key,” he said.

  – 3 –

  Come up to a humid Sunday of late June—

  The day had the ominous feeling of such grey dense Sundays—it was sour with foreboding—as the vapours of paranoia floated in from Killala Bay, and the ridgeback line of the Ox Mountains lay prone, like a crouched beast, their tone dark bluish in the haze, sombre, and watchful like a beast.

  The detective, Sergeant Brown—Sergeant Tom Brown, plainly—drove an unmarked Primera along the sea road in his flop sweat and rancour.

  “Bastard,” he said.

  He was trying to keep a fix on the Canavan’s movements but it was to no avail—the fucker was like water through your hands. And what troubled the sergeant above all was the fact of the fungating mass. This Canavan was not long for the world or its women.

  He might do anything now.

  – 4 –

  Sergeant Brown was from a line of guards. His father had been the sergeant at Aughris before he drank himself into the clay of the place. His father’s father had at the time that it was still Royal Irish Constabulary been the sergeant at Ballincarrow before he drank himself into the clay of the place. His father’s father’s father had been the sergeant at Easkey when they were still jawing grass at the side of the road and spitting the green juice, and he, too, had drank himself into the clay of the place.

  Sergeant Tom Brown did not drink. He suffered instead the terrible want of a sweet tooth. Sugar ran him. He sat in a humid murk, himself vaporous, gently steaming, in the Primera, outside the Emo station, on the N59, beneath the hateful shadow of the Ox, and he ate a Swiss roll.

  He looked at himself in the mirror—the big sticky face on it like a child’s.

  “Here’s another day I get fucken fatter,” he said.

  He wheezed terribly now climbing a stair. He wheezed as hard again coming down. He hadn’t enjoyed a mirror since the late eighties. He was sixty-five now and just three weeks from his retirement—his determination was to have Canavan looked after before it.

  – 5 –

  The consultant oncologist at the Regional Hospital went back so far with the sergeant that they had done the long jump together. He was not only his oldest but among his most useful confidants. Canavan’s tumour, he explained, was feeding on his very youth and vitality.

  “An auld fella might slow it,” he said. “A young f
ella won’t.”

  It was pacing hard. It was spreading all over. It had gone into the lymph. Canavan, in his manly noon, at twenty-nine years of age, had refused the treatment, having been told it would likely make him impotent and the hair fall out.

  “He won’t see Christmas lights, Tom,” the oncologist said.

  And they both knew what that meant.

  Canavan could do anything now.

  – 6 –

  He was about the Ox country yet. This much the sergeant knew for sure. And about the Ox his powers were affiliated with the supernatural—you could corner him to a patch of ground the width of a postage stamp but even so he would wriggle free, and have time enough to look back over the shoulder, lock a glance, and smoulder.

  He knew the bog roads, the copses, the cypress arbours. He knew the recesses of the hills and the turlough hides. He knew the crannies of the coast. He knew the new-build estates and the spread and bungalow drift of the ever-changing villages, and the backways of townlands, and the gardens of priests, and the old walled demesnes, just as he knew the lairs of ripe widows, and the dampish, seablown, lavatorial odour of beachside apartments, and knew the tin-roofed sheds, the outbuildings, the caves. He knew Zion Hill and the Union Wood. He knew the ruts and tunnels of the country, the country of the Ox, a post-glaciated terrain, and knew where mountains had moved, the cracks and openings that were made—he knew the country of the Ox, and the infinite thousands of its hiding places.

  – 7 –

  A Canavan knew also the greatest of the male consolations—that a girl could be made to laugh, a girl with an apple-cheeked arse. The pale-green days of these Atlantic reaches could be enlivened only by fucking and fighting—moments of violent glow—and the Canavan magic was to make sparks from little. Each in the stepped line of the generations was a taunt to the next: a taunt to exceed, go further. Everything was passed down, the gestures even. The curl of lip and set of shoulders, and the weird skills, too, as in the way a Canavan could by wary nature catch on the air the tang of policeman—to a Canavan, it had an aniseed note.