That Old Country Music

by Kevin Barry

  It felt as if the wind was holding its breath.

  * * *

  The matter of the verses, at this point, switches to the effect of these events on the herdsman himself. His world now was in a great tumult. This small, vivid, fair-haired presence in his life, and in his bachelor’s bed, was utterly unexpected—it must have been like a visitation from another world. He woke up within himself and not pleasantly. He could feel the way the hot blood moved through him. He woke to the true and unexpected capacities of his heart, his awful capacities. He woke each day now to the previously unknown torments of love and desire. In fact, the song puts it more plainly, and in the true demotic language of the south county, and I can only honestly translate the sense of a particular line as follows—

  The poor herdsman of Culfadda was cunt-struck.

  * * *

  She told him that her husband was cruel to her but she could not leave him—if she left him, he would surely die. He came to believe in her almost religiously. When he said her name it was in an awed whisper and as if in litany. He came to see her as a saintly figure almost, his Saint Catherine, his saviour.

  * * *

  Now the complications of the entanglement came to obsess the vicinity as they did the verses of the song. The people of the district tried to reason the story out. Leitrim was reckoned a handsome man but, in the way of good-looking men, it was supposed that he would quickly come to bore a woman. The herdsman was nothing to write home about in the looks department—plain and startled-looking, we’re told—but he had a great sweetness of nature. Leitrim was “a bitter drop,” the song suggested, while the man on the hill was “buttermilk.” He was a man also who could listen to a woman. She called to him each day as their spring gave on to a loving summer. As their physical love grew more practised, its hours slowed and pleasures deepened. His herd was by the love affair orphaned and drifted gormlessly and all but wild across the hill. She could be heard to sing to him sometimes on those summer afternoons. (If there’s any patch of happiness to be found walking on that hill now, I wonder if it might remain from the moments of her singing?) The herdsman grew accustomed to her caresses, and to her compliments, and he might even have come to believe, foolishly, that he deserved them.

  Then, inside a year, without forewarning, she left him and destroyed him.

  * * *

  The turn in the song was drastic, quick, and ugly. The veils were ripped away from the verses. It was revealed to be a story of erotic wickedness and greed. The Leitrim husband had been in collusion all the while. It was no more than a sport for them. The herdsman was an object they used to bring an excitement darkly to their own coupling. She fed the husband every last morsel of those afternoons. The song tells us, in perhaps its most terrible verse, that he even came quietly up the hill sometimes to watch.

  I could not but imagine the nights the plan of it was laid down, by lamps or by candlelight, the wicked spirit of the husband inhabiting and steering to foul design the willingness of his wife, the way they wrote the verses of it almost, the way the young herdsman who appeared on that fair day in Ballymote was drawn into being only by their shared and urgent carnal need. He could not have existed in the form that he took without them.

  Love, we are reminded, yet again, is not about staring into each other’s eyes; love is about staring out together in the same direction, even if the gaze has menace or badness underlain.

  Do you mean that I am going to be left? the herdsman said.

  * * *

  The transcription was not yet complete but already I was in a terrible state. I got up from the desk and rolled the blind and looked out to the north Dublin night. Hours had passed by since I sat down to work on the closing verses. The lights of the estates burned coldly in the silence of midnight; beyond were the lights of the airport fields. I thought about ringing Karen and trying to explain what had gone wrong with us earlier in the year. But the prospect of standing there, at fifty-four years of age, with the phone in my hand, husky of voice, passion’s slave—it was too much. Anyway, as the song made clear, we have no agency in our romantic manoeuvres—the decisions are all made for us, without our even knowing. The decisions are out there already, on the air.

  And beneath the lights of the city all those people were out there, being born and dying, and steered in their unknowing, all the way from the first moment to the last.

  * * *

  The woman from the Bricklieves came to me that same night in a dream. I saw her advancing out of the darkness—she was lithe, blonde, and agile. She had a terrible utterance on her lips as she came towards me, and a kind of madness in her eyes. It was as if she meant to do me harm, and I retreated backwards into my sleep, step by careful step.

  Maybe she was just aware that her own time was so pinched and mean. Maybe all she wanted was as much of what that mean life could give.

  * * *

  In the Bricklieve hills, so long ago now, the herdsman wanted nothing more than for his life to end but it would not end. He had so many years left to imagine her. Her movement, her taste, and the slur of indecipherable words that emerged when she lay in a half-sleep after lovemaking. There were decades yet in which his destruction would continue, day by day, night by night, cell by cell. She never darkened the climbing path to call on him again. He never saw her face coloured by the sunlight of those mountain fields again. If he had, he would have at once forgiven her—this was the sentence passed down for the sin of his adoration.

  It is the herdsman that takes us out of this sorrowful piece but as my head fell onto the desk, all wrung-out and wretched, the song’s closing plea might as well have been issued as my own—

  Oh lie with me once more, my love, if only for the last time.

  TORONTO AND THE STATE OF GRACE

  The winter bleeds us out here. These December mornings, it is often just myself and the dead jellyfish who are left to the beach. These are the lion’s mane corpses that get washed in on the equinoctial gales and they come in terrible numbers some years, as if there’s been a genocide out there. They look like pink foetal messes flung about the sand and rocks—kids call the place the abortion beach—and the corpses are so preserved in the winter air they’re a long time rotting down. How the soul lifts on the morning stroll. Then there’s the endless afternoon to contend with—mostly, I have the bar to just myself and the radio, and we sit there and drone at each other. Maybe there’s a lone customer, a depressed old farmer down from the hills, or maybe, the odd day, there are two. I am at this stage largely beyond caring.

  But it was on just such a lifeless and dreary winter day, almost precisely as our ten streetlamps came on to glow against the dusk, that the rental car pulled up outside. I could hear two voices raised in an odd, quivery singing, but the voices ceased as the engine cut. A slight man in late middle age stepped out and braced himself against the evening chill. He looked at the sign above my door—it reads Sullivan, still, though it’s years since there’s been a Sullivan here. He came around the car and opened the passenger door and a frail bird-faced old dear in furs emerged. He offered an arm but she was proud to manage without. They stepped up together to stare through my window and their eyes were lit so madly that my breath caught in forewarning.

  They entered my pub like a squall of hectic weather. There was a kind of cheerful eeriness about them. They took grinning to the bar stools. He swivelled a half-turn and squinted as he read the spirit labels—

  “It’s an attractive selection, Mother,” he said.

  “Let’s not be rash, Tony,” she said.

  But she swivelled a half-turn, too, and hers drew a slow creak to the room that sounded in a crescent-moon shape, ominously.

  “We’ll work our way across the toppermost states,” he said.

  “Oh, Tony,” she said. “Riding the Empire Builder? Again?”

  He half rose from his stool, crooned a verse from “The Black Hills o
f Dakota,” fell back again. He was fey and thin and whippety; she had the remnants of a sharp-boned beauty yet.

  “He’s a dreadful child but kind,” she confided, and she laid her touch to the back of my hand where it gripped with white knuckles the bar top. Hers was paper-brown and cut deep with wrinkles.

  “A Laphroaig to set us off from the station,” he said, sitting again. “Let’s strap ourselves in, dear.”

  “Laphroaig, Tony? Is that the peaty number?”

  “Like drinking the bloody fireplace,” he said.

  “Two?”

  “Water to the side,” he said.

  I set them and they sipped, and they considered each other with the same liquid eyes, and relaxed.

  “Have you travelled far today?”

  “Oh Christ,” he said. “Was it Kenmare, Mother? Was the last place?”

  “Horrendous,” she said, and placed thin fingers to her throat in long suffering.

  “Full of horrible skinny Italians on bicycles,” he said. “Calves on like knitting needles and their rude bits in Lycra. I mean it’s bloody December!”

  “In fact,” she said, “we were rather run out of town.”

  “There was an incident,” he confirmed, “over supper.”

  “Last night?” she said. “We’re barely in the door and there’s talk of the guards.”

  “Five-star melodrama,” he said. “Matinée and evening performances.”

  “We had…stopped off,” she said. “En route.”

  “We were a little…tired,” he said.

  “We thought we’d take things more gently today,” she said.

  “Nonsense,” he said. “We’re riding the Empire Builder. We’re taking the high ground. Is that a Cork gin I see?”

  It was second along the line of optics from the Laphroaig—I thought, surely they can’t be in earnest? There was a line of nine spirits turned and hung along there.

  “Mine’s with just the tiniest drizzle of soda water,” she said.

  “Mine’s a slice of lime, if you have it,” he said.

  “To be honest…”

  “Surprise me,” he said. “Straight up is fine. Though I may become poisonous and embittered.”

  “Given you’ve a head start,” she said.

  “Do you see now?” he said. “Do you see now what I’m dealing with?”

  I tried for what I imagined was a half-smile and set their gins.

  “One yourself?” he said.

  “I don’t, actually.”

  Sobriety was the mean violet of dusk through the bar’s window; the mean view down the falling fields to the never-ending sea; the violet of another mean winter for me.

  “Toronto!” she cried.

  “Oh Mother,” he said. “It’s barely gone five.”

  “Anthony was conceived in Toronto,” she said. “I was Ophelia to Daddy’s Prince. We’re talking 1953, barman.”

  He didn’t look sixty. He had the faded yellowish skin tone of a preserved lemon. Pickled, I suppose is what I’m trying to say, but it seems unkind.

  * * *

  Their moods came and went with each sip as it was taken. He took a sullen turn on the Cork gin—

  “Kenmare was the fucking horrors,” he said. “I had one of my spells.”

  “He hasn’t had a spell since September,” she said. “Not saying October was a picnic.”

  “Five this morning?” he said. “I’m lying in the bed, my heart is going like gangbusters, and there are bloody crows on the roof—crows! And they’re at their screeching and their bloody cawing and the worst of it is I can make out the words.”

  I couldn’t but ask—

  “You don’t want to know,” he said. “Suffice to say I’ve always suspected the worst of crows.”

  “A crow is a crow,” she flapped a wrist. “It’s the rooks you want to watch out for.”

  “Oh, a rook knows,” he said.

  “Knows?”

  “The day and the hour,” he said.

  “Sleep is a thing of the past for me,” she said. “You’ll find this as you get older, boys.”

  The bar was empty but for them. I just wanted to lock up for the day and not open for the night. I wanted to drink mint tea upstairs and watch television and go on the internet. But they were making light work of the Cork gin.

  “It was a dry town,” she said, narrowing her eyes, “was Toronto.”

  “Hideous Protestant bastards,” he said. “What’s this is next along?”

  I turned, coldly; I tried to look stern.

  “I’m afraid that’s a very cheap and nasty Spanish brandy.”

  “How did you know I was coming?” he said.

  * * *

  The moving sea gleamed; it moved its lights in a black glister; it moved rustily on its cables.

  “Of course Daddy was several years senior to me,” she said. “I was a young Ophelia. He was an old Prince. Oh but impressive. He had range, had Daddy.”

  “Do you realise,” he said, “that my father was born in 1889?”

  “My goodness.”

  “Picture it,” he said, swirling the last of his gin and signalling for two brandies; she’d already finished hers and had her palms placed expectantly on the bar top.

  “1889,” he said. “This was in County Mayo. In a cabin, no less, and in low circumstances. A whore mother bleeding down the thighs and seventeen screaming bastards swinging from the rafters…”

  “Anthony,” she said. “Really.”

  “To even emerge from such a milieu,” he said, “walking upright and not on all fours speaks of something heroic in the old lech.”

  “He carried himself well,” she said. “Daddy had class always.”

  “Meaning?” he said.

  “Apples and trees, dear,” she said. “You’ve got some, too.”

  “Some?” he said.

  Together they tested their brandies with tentative lips.

  “Coca-Cola,” she said, and I set a small bottle for a mixer.

  “I shouldn’t,” he said. “The caffeine doesn’t agree with me.”

  He took a hard nip from his Spanish—suspiciously—but smiled then and looked up with new glee and blew the room a kiss. He slithered from the bar stool, began to hum an old romantic tune that was somehow familiar to me, and waltzed a slow-shoed shuffle as though with his own ghost.

  “Julio Iglesias,” she said.

  The door opened and one of my poor farmers poked a glance in—Tony sang to him and pointed as he waltzed towards the door—my farmer turned and moved off down the village, sharpish.

  Tony grabbed the door and shouted to the night after him—

  “Come back at half past eight, darling! I’ll be doing my Burl Ives!”

  The chill of the evening faded again as he let the door swing closed and he took happily to his bar stool.

  “Toronto?” she said. “The house was half empty most nights but the company was lively.”

  “Evidently,” he said.

  “I think it happened the very first time,” she said. “He’d got his hands on a bathtub gin, had Daddy.”

  “The telling detail,” he said.

  “Tasted like turps,” she said, “but it did make one pleasantly lightheaded.”

  He squinted again at the line of optics and shook his head.

  “Now my wife?” he said.

  “Don’t, Tony,” she said.

  “Oh and by the way,” he said. “What did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t. I’m Alan.”

  “Well, Al,” he said, “it turns out that my darling wife has only taken off with the Pilates instructor. A she. And twice the man I’ll ever be.”

  “You should never have married an actress, darling.”
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  “So you’ve been saying this last fourteen years, Mother.”

  “Marry the shop girl,” she said. “Marry the factory line. Marry the barmaid. MARRY THE WHORE! But never, never marry the actress, Tony.”

  “Well, it’s a little late for it, Mother.”

  “Of course in Toronto,” she said, “there wasn’t a great deal to do in the evenings. And the show’d finish for seven!”

  “He gave her one down the fish dock.”

  “Oh Tony,” she said.

  “By the mighty Ontario,” he said.

  “Folks,” I said, “listen, I mean really…”

  “County Mayo–style,” he said. “You know what I mean, soldier?”

  “Tony,” she said, disappointedly.

  “As for my betrothed? I said, Well! I said, This Pilates has given you a whole new lease of life, Martina. You’ve come in glowing and you’re up to four sessions a week.”

  “What’s this is next along the line, Andy?”

  “Alan,” I said, and submitted to my fate. The way they moved was sure as a tide.

  “It’s an Absolut vodka,” I said.

  “Marvellous,” he said. “One minute we’re rock-chewing Spanish peasants humping the donkey in a humid night wind…”

  “Humid!” she cried.

  “…the next we’re on the porch of the dacha, it’s a summer’s evening, placid…”

  “Placid,” she said. “A light breeze licking the trees.”

  “Pine-scented secrets,” he said. “Cruel handsome souls with cheekbones like knives. Burly intrigue…”

  “Burl Ives,” she said.

  “…and some rather fetching Cossack-type headgear. A tubercular old sort about to hack his last…”

  I poured and set the vodkas over ice—they slammed them back neat.