Short Story 2: The Skinner and The Government Goat

The Skinner and The Government Goat

A Short Story by Cal Ward
(all characters and events are fictitious and are inspired by real people and events)

Sometime in 1984 in the vast boglands of County Offaly, Holohan happened to be drinking in the public house of an old acquaintance who rejoiced in the name of "The Skinner Brady".  Skinner was a big man who liked meat and happened to ask Holohan if he would be willing to sell him a "nice government goat", (by this he meant a young yearling deer whose ownership shifted back and forth between the Department of Wildlife and God, depending on whose grass he was eating) and which could be diverted into Skinner's freezer without official knowledge or interference and at an attractive price.  Now as it happened, Holohan had no love for Skinner and no deer either and no money to boot, and resolved to refinance himself AND settle old scores by selling him a billygoat instead of a deer and he proposed to enlist the help of his good friend Nicky Carroll in this scam.

Nicky Carroll was quite a character in his own right. Holohan had met him  in the "Bog Barrow"  in Clonloum, Co. Offaly.  He was sometimes called " The Goat" by unkind people envious of his contempt for convention.  This remarkable gentleman, in exchange for a couple of pints made Holohan the proud owner of "Booby", a six-week old female Common Irish Goat and thus began a relationship with both goats and Nicky Carroll which was both long lived and productive.  Nicky Carroll was a builder by trade, a prodigious drinker of Guinness, an eccentric, raconteur, self taught man of letters, hellraiser, poacher, philosopher, fighter, goat farmer and con artist wanted by departments of Justice, Taxation and Social Welfare in both Britain and Ireland.  His notoriety was enormous.  Thrice married, his career carried him to Britain where he worked for many years and South Africa which was not to his liking, being a man of confirmed egalitarian views. In the summer of 1985 he had recently moved to Clonloum and was enjoying country living to the full.  He loved nothing better than a challenge and he carried a grudge against all publicans, a class he believed responsible for exploiting the poor.



Booby proved a success as a milker and family pet and provided the Holohan household with milk and entertainment in abundance for many years.  She spent her evenings with the family in front of the fire, had her own armchair, loved curry powder and bullied and disciplined the obstreperous horde of fox terriers with her vicious little horns.  She accompanied Concepta on walks and Holohan when he went fishing in the river.  She gave birth to six pairs of male twins and her genes are well represented in the feral goat population of the huge Boora boglands.  She was a renowned thief and taught her children how to steal Jacob's Goldgrain Biscuits from the shopping bags in the back of the car.  She had a vocabulary of about twenty bleats, grunts, snorts, and squeaks and Holohan often astonished friends by conducting a mutually informative conversation with Booby in this dialect.  Her passing was an occasion of genuine grief in the family.  She also led to the discovery that feral goats are a plentiful but unwanted commodity in the Offaly boglands and an exploitable one.  Most farmers have been plagued by unwanted goats at some time and these animals could be had for the taking by someone willing to catch, or, as in Holohan's case, hunt and kill them.  The meat of the younger ones is nutritious food for humans and the older ones are useful as dog meat.  This was a windfall as Holohan had a kennelfull of hungry English Wire Haired Fox terriers at the time. Also he had recently been made redundant from a factory job and the saving on butcher's bills was welcome.  The skins could be made into Bodhráns (traditional Irish tambourines) and sold and there was a steady local market in both table and dog meat.  Of course the real attraction was the hunting.  Most shooters would regard the shooting of feral or domestic animals as beneath their dignity and for this reason anybody with the equipment and the willingness to hunt unwanted goats found his services in constant demand from goat-plagued farmers.  I say "hunt' because goats are not easily killed and must be stalked like a deer, especially the wilder ones.  Holohan specialised in culling the herds of tough mountainy billygoats that inhabited the high ridges of Wolftrap Mountain near the pass known as "The Cut" in the Slieve Bloom Mountains.  These were a near inexhaustible supply of meat and hides since their numbers were regularly swelled by evictions from the backs of cattle trucks which regularly crossed "The Cut" travelling to and from cattle marts.  Truckers would load cattle for transport to the mart and oblige the farmer by removing any unwanted goats also.  These were usually unloaded while crossing the mountains late at night after the pubs closed in Clonaslee.  The practice infuriated the Forestry Department who, concerned for their crop of young trees, were happy to see Holohan control their numbers.  That he also "controlled" the numbers of the resident deer herd was a source of unease.

Holohan's deeply felt grudge against Skinner Brady came about as a result of an earlier transaction between them in which he had been bettered.

One Saturday night about 1977 while enjoying the hospitality (?) of Mr. Skinner's establishment he (Skinner) happened to mention that he wanted a dozen cured fox skins .  He was planning to marry he said and was renovating his father's old house and wanted to decorate the walls with something "different".  Actually he wanted to impress his friends with his shooting prowess and was too lazy to shoot, kill and cure his own fox skins.  At the time Holohan was making good money shooting and selling raw dried fox furs to the fur trade and was a little reluctant to take on the extra work of curing and scraping skins for little profit.  Skinner agreed to pay twenty five pounds a skin however and Holohan went to work.  When the first of the skins were ready he brought them over to the Skinner's and collected the money.  Thus reassured he finished another lot and brought them over only to be told that the quality was poor (which it was not, for Holohan knew his trade) and he could offer Holohan only twenty pounds each. Holohan agreed. He was offered ten pounds each for the next lot and six for the final lot which Holohan had to accept because he was broke and as Skinner so succinctly put it "Ya have yer shite anyway, sure no-one else will buy them, the dealer wants raw skins only".  True.  Holohan took his pittance and relegated Skinner Brady to the unfinished business section of his prodigious memory.  This humiliation would not remain unavenged. The total amount of which he had been defrauded came to eighty pounds in Holohan's estimation. His dignity, professional reputation and his pocket were damaged; He couldn't show his face in Clonloum for weeks. 

Then there was the more serious matter of Holohan's whiskey-running enterprise. For several years Holohan and a friend from Tyrone, Sammie Winter, had smuggled Bushmills Whiskey down from “The Wee North”.  They had wisely avoided the untrustworthy Skinner when seeking customers but Skinner had heard about the operation and had “leaked” information to the Revenue Commisioners.  Holohan and Winter narrowly avoided getting caught.  Skinner would pay sooner or later.

Having decided to avenge himself on Skinner, the rest was simple.  With the invaluable assistance of Nicky Carroll a plot was hatched.  They located a particularly large and smelly billygoat somewhere along the Offaly-Laois border in a remote part of the Slieve Bloom Mountains called Ballyhuppahane and dispatched him cleanly with a 45 grain .22 Hornet bullet through his slightly underdeveloped brain leaving his meat undamaged - ninety pounds of it to be exact.  Holohan, a competent amateur butcher, surpassed himself to the extent that by the time the billy was butchered, hung, cut and bagged ready for delivery he actually looked like prime venison or "Government Goat".  His highly odoriferous and tawny coloured skin was undergoing preparation for it's transformation into a musical instrument in a large barrel of lime and water at the back of Tommy Newman's cottage in Clara.  Needless to say, the fee for providing such a fine big goatskin without any bullet holes in it and capable of furnishing two Bodhráns had been a few pints of stout in Hop Murphy's bar -provided by the grateful Tommy. His magnificent head, equipped with two twisting scimitar like horns, had been skinned and cooked in the big pot on Holohan's cooker, stripped of meat, bleached, dried, varnished and mounted by Nicky Carroll on a lovely slab of bog oak from Boora Bog and now stared down in macabre splendour from the wall above the bar in Hop Murphy's.  For this fine ornament to his even finer establishment old Hop Murphy had been persuaded to part with twenty five pounds.

Finally, on the big day , Nicky and Holohan fortified themselves for the ordeal ahead and headed for the Skinner's Bar with the billygoat neatly packed and boxed in cutlets in the back of the van.  Skinner Brady was a man of keen wit; a fact belied by his somewhat uncouth exterior.  "As rough as a bear's arse, as mane as a crow and as cute as a cut cat" as one regular put it.  They need not have worried, however.  Skinner was in rare form and so determined to defraud that he never for a moment considered he might himself be the victim.  He blustered and scoffed and criticised and pretended to change his mind and disputed weights and prices per pound and finally stooped so low as to check the weight of the meat on his grocery shop scales.  When he ran out of weights he used a sledgehammer head to balance his scales which certainly did not weigh the ten pounds he claimed.  Finally, content in the knowledge that he had browbeaten and defrauded the hunters by price and weight he finally beat them down to £1 per pound for eighty pounds of meat from the agreed 90 at £1.50.  Four crispy twenty pound notes changed hands and the boys were away with enough loot for a few day's boozing at the prices then current.  They proceeded to drink their way home to Clonloum; enjoying a few at Skinner's expense in every tavern along the way while making certain that every drinker they encountered was fully conversant with the manner and extent of Skinner's humiliation.  They finished the evening in Hop Murphy's in the company of Tommy Newman and a crowd of horse dealers from Ballinasloe which acquaintanceship ensured the story would travel to Galway, and beyond, the following day.

It had been, by any standards, a successful operation.  The billy had provided porter to the value of eighty pounds at a time when a pint cost a pound;  Tommy Newman, the Bodhrán maker, had netted a further fifty for two samples of his work sporting the billy's dehaired and dehydrated skin and was always good for a pint in time of great need.  The  old billy had been immortalised in rustic art on Hop Murphy's wall. The single clean bullet hole precisely half way between the eye and the ear bore silent tribute to the hunter's craft and the story of Skinner's embezzlement would be told and retold for generations, enhancing immeasurably both Holohan's and Nicky Carroll's reputations, not to mention providing them with the odd pint from audiences all over the county eager to hear the embellished details of the escapade from the mouths of the main characters.  Many a drinker from such faraway villages a Clonaslee, Rhode or Ballinahown entered Murphy's bar for the first time, nodded at the mounted head and enquired of Hop, "Is that himself"?  A man even wrote a story about them in a magazine and a woman from America who was writing a book about her ancestors came to interview them.  Undoubtedly, more orders for mounted goat heads would come from publicans wishing to cash in on the new fashion and bestow a degree of raffish elegance on their premises.  Life was good.  A legend had been created.

The story does not end here, however.  A problem arose.  Skinner, when visited a fortnight later seemed unaware he had been "done" as evidenced by the smirk on his well fed face and boastful remarks to his customers about his bargaining prowess ("Ye can't cod th' Auld Skinner") and the quality of the contents of his freezer, ("I'm atein' like a feckin' suck pig").  The sweet taste of victory turned to ashes in Holohan's and Carroll's mouths for what was the point of it all if Skinner didn't realise he was a dupe and a wally?  Did he actually know so little about meat that he thought billygoat was venison?  Obviously Skinner needed education.  Holohan took the problem to Larry Fletcher who was a longtime customer and a renowned man of words from Walsh Island who loved to bait the avaricious publican.  "leave it to me said Larry" and they did.  Weeks later, They visited the Skinner's Bar for a drink and observed that Skinner's cockiness had changed to a sullen sheepishness.  They couldn't understand why until they heard Larry Fletcher's raised voice calling for a large whiskey and sounding familiar when he said "maaaaaaaaaaaay I haaaaaaaaaaaave  a laaaaaaaaarge whiskey plaaaaaaaaaase, Skinner", and as an aside to his boozing companions "He used never heed me until I taught him goatese,  The diet helps too, you know".  Skinner lowered his great head and gritted his teeth an hoped it would all blow over.

Nowadays, Nicky Carroll is Retired and Holohan has become a respectable small businessman.  He is strictly teetotal and has left his disreputable past far behind although he still hunts, but legally now and with less commitment.  Skinner Brady is a patriarch; Larry Fletcher, Tommy Newman and Hop Murphy are dead and the unfortunate billygoat still glares balefully and sightlessly down from his dusty perch in Murphy's.  Booby was shot by a forester in Ballycumber for the crime of grazing government grass.  Sometimes Holohan visits one of his old haunts for a chat and a glass of Lucozade and some wag with a long memory will ask him if he has anything tasty in the van.  He smiles a little regretfully and remembers misty, frosty days in the mountains thirty years before, and the raucous company of old cronies in some little pub at the end of the day and hunting terriers that have gone to wherever old terriers go, and wonders if he was more alive then.