John McGahern - Creatures of the Earth - New and Selected Stories

‘Tom didn’t come with you?’ Charlie asked as soon as he brought the fit of coughing under control.

‘No. He was done in with the walking and the wife was expecting him.’

‘They say he’s coming up for permanent soon. Do you think he will have any trouble?’

‘The most thing he’s afraid of is the medical.’

Charlie was silent for a while, and then he said, ‘It’s a quare caper that, isn’t it, the heart on the wrong side?’

‘There’s many a quare caper, Charlie,’ the teacher replied. ‘Life itself is a quare caper if you ask me.’

‘But what’ll he do if he doesn’t get permanent?’

‘What’ll we all do, Charlie?’ the teacher said inwardly and, as always when driven in to reflect on his own life, instinctively fixed the brown hat more firmly on his head.

Once he did not bother to wear a hat or a cap over his thick curly fair hair even when it was raining. And he was in love then with Cathleen O’Neill. They’d thought time would wait for them for ever as they went to the sea in his baby Austin or to dances after spending Sundays on the river. And then, suddenly, his hair began to fall out. Anxiety exasperated desire to a passion, the passion to secure his life as he felt it slip away, to moor it to the woman he loved. Now it was her turn to linger. She would not marry him and she would not let him go.

‘Will you marry me or not? I want an answer one way or the other this evening.’ He felt his whole life like a stone on the edge of a boat out on water.

‘What if I don’t want to answer?’ They were both proud and iron-willed.

‘Then I’ll take it as No.’

‘You’ll have to take it whatever way you want, then.’ Her face was flushed with resentment.

‘Goodbye, then.’ He steeled himself to turn away.

Twice he almost paused, but no voice calling him back came. At the open iron gate above the stream he did pause. ‘If I cross it here it is the end. Anything is better than the anguish of uncertainty. If I cross here I cannot turn back even if she should want.’ He counted till ten and looked back, but her back was turned, walking slowly uphill to the house. As she passed through the gate he felt a tearing that broke as an inaudible cry.

No one ever saw him afterwards without his brown hat, and there was great scandal the first Sunday he wore it in the body of the church. The man kneeling next to him nudged him, gestured with his thumb at the hat, but the teacher did not even move. Whispers and titters and one hysterical whinny of laughter that set off a general sneeze ran through the congregation as he unflinchingly wore it through the service.

The priest was up to the school just before hometime the very next day. They let the children home early.

‘Have you seen Miss O’Neill recently, Jim?’ the priest opened cautiously, for he liked the young teacher, the most intelligent and competent he had.

‘No, Father. That business is finished.’

‘There’d be no point in me putting in a word?’

‘There’d be no point, Father.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. It’s no surprise. Everything gets round these parts in a shape.’

‘In a shape, certainly, Father.’ There was dry mockery in the voice.

‘When it gets wild it is different, when you hear talk of nothing else — and that’s what has brought me up. What’s going the rounds now is that you wore your hat all through Mass yesterday.’

‘They were right for once, Father.’

‘I’m amazed.’

‘Why, Father?’

‘You’re an intelligent man. You know you can’t do that, Jim.’

‘Why not, Father?’

‘You don’t need me to tell you that it’d appear as an extreme form of disrespect.’

‘If the church can’t include my own old brown hat, it can’t include very much, can it, Father?’

‘You know that and I know that, but we both know that the outward shows may least belie themselves. It’d not be tolerated.’

‘It’ll have to be tolerated, Father or …’

‘You can’t be that mad. I know you’re the most intelligent man round here.’

‘Thanks, Father. All votes in that direction count round here. “They said I was mad and I said they were mad, and confound them they outvoted me,”’ he quoted. ‘That’s about it, isn’t it, Father?’

‘Ah, stop it, Jim. Tell me why. Seriously, tell me why.’

‘You may have noticed recently, Father,’ he began slowly, in rueful mockery, ‘a certain manifestation that my youth is ended. Namely, that I’m almost bald. It had the effect of timor mortis . So I decided to cover it up.’

‘Many lose their hair. Bald or grey, what does it matter? We all go that way.’

‘So?’

‘When I look down from the altar on Sunday half the heads on the men’s side are bald.’

‘The women must cover their crowning glory and the men must expose their lack of a crown. So that’s the old church in her wisdom bringing us all to heel?’

‘I can’t understand all this fooling, Jim.’

‘I’m deadly serious. I’ll wear my hat in the same way as you wear your collar, Father.’

‘But that’s nonsense. It’s completely different.’

‘Your collar is the sublimation of timor mortis . What else is it, in Jesus Christ? All I’m asking is to cover it up.’

‘But you can’t wear it all the time?’

‘Maybe not in bed but that’s different.’

‘Listen. This joking has gone far enough. I don’t care where you wear your hat. That’s your problem. But if you wear it in church you make it my problem.’

‘Well, you’ll have to do something about it then, Father.’

The priest went very silent but when he spoke all he said was, ‘Why don’t we lock up the school? We can walk down the road together.’

What faced the priest was alarmingly simple: he couldn’t have James Sharkey at Mass with his hat on and he couldn’t have one of his teachers not at Sunday Mass. Only late that night did a glimmer of what might be done come to him. Every second Sunday the teacher collected coins from the people entering the church at a table just inside the door. If the collection table was moved out to the porch and Sharkey agreed to collect the coins every Sunday, perhaps he could still make his observances while keeping his infernal hat on. The next morning he went to the administrator.

‘By luck we seem to have hit on a solution,’ he was able to explain to the teacher that evening.

‘That’s fine with me. I never wanted to be awkward,’ the teacher said.

‘You never wanted to be awkward,’ the priest exploded. ‘You should have heard me trying to convince the administrator this morning that it was better to move the table out into the porch than to move you out of the school. I’ve never seen a man so angry in my life. You’d have got short shrift, I’m telling you, if you were in his end of the parish. Tell me, tell me what would you have done if the administrator had got his way and fired you?’

‘I’d have got by somehow. Others do,’ he answered.

And soon people had got so used to the gaunt face under the brown hat behind the collection table every Sunday that they’d be as shocked now to see him without it after all the years as they had been on the first Sunday he wore it.

‘That’s right, Charlie. What’ll we all do?’ he repeated as he finished the whiskey beside the oil heater. ‘Here. Give us another drop before the crowd start to come in and I get caught.’

My brown hat and his heart on the wrong side and you tippling away secretly when the whole parish including your wife knows it. It’s a quare caper indeed, Charlie, he thought as he quickly finished his whiskey to avoid getting caught by the crowd due to come in.