John McGahern: By the Lake

“It’s hard to understand. Couldn’t he have waited a few seconds for him to climb back on the trailer?”

“Ignorance. Pure ignorance. There’s no other way to describe it. One day I was watching them turning sods. There were two other men in the field with Jackie that I won’t name. I was watching through the hedge. Bill’s job was to trample the sods into place with the big wellingtons. Every time they’d pass close with the plough to where he was stepping the sods they’d knock him with a kick or a shove into the furrow and kill themselves laughing. It was their idea of sport.”

“Couldn’t you do something?”

“What could you do? If I went into the field they’d turn on me unless I went and knocked him into the furrow as well. That was the year he ran away. He never did a better act. Nobody knew how he got away. He must have walked and got lifts. He was gone two years. He’d be gone still but a crowd up for the All-Ireland stopped at a pub outside Mullingar for a drink on the way home. They didn’t even recognise Bill. He had got fat and was in boots and ordinary clothes. They couldn’t believe when he gave them this great welcome. He had his hand out of course for cigarettes. The place was a farm as well as a pub. He was a kind of a potboy and got to drink all the leftovers. They should have kept their big mouths shut. Jackie and two other men got into the Ford Prefect one Sunday and drove up to Mullingar and brought him back.”

“Did they force him?”

“Nobody knows. He could even have been delighted to see them. He could have given them the same welcome as he gave to the All-Ireland crowd. The next Sunday he was back at Mass with his hand out for cigarettes as if he had never been away.” Jamesie had risen to leave.

On the way out through the porch, Jamesie’s whole attention became fixed on the four iron posts standing upright in their concrete base in the small garden between the house and the orchard.

“Lord bless us, but Patrick Ryan is a living sight. He starts everything and finishes nothing.”

“One of these years he’ll be back,” Ruttledge said.

“We have all been scourged,” Jamesie said sympathetically.

“When we came first it was hard waiting for him and never knowing whether he’d turn up or not. Watching that empty road around the lake all day until you knew for sure by evening that he wasn’t coming. Now it doesn’t matter.”

“Still, you’d like it finished,” Jamesie said. “Those four posts standing there on their own are a living sight. All they need is a crossbeam and a rope and a crowd and a cart and a man to hang.”

“Where is Patrick these days?”

“The last I heard he was around Dromod putting up a garage for diggers and dozers. He could be gone from there by now. His poor cattle are about the hill.”

“I’ve often wondered why he keeps cattle at all.”

“For the name. The name of cattle and land. Without the cattle and the land he’d be just another wandering tradesman. I know Patrick all my life. His poor brother, who’s as gentle as a lamb, has been bad for several weeks in Carrick and Patrick hasn’t once called to see him. They say poor Mrs. Logan and the dog are lost for him ever since he went into hospital.”

They walked together between the steep banks of the lane. The banks were in the full glory of the summer, covered with foxgloves and small wild strawberries and green vetches. The air was scented with wild woodbine. Before they saw Bill Evans they saw the slow puffs of cigarette smoke behind a screen of young alders. He was seated on an upturned bucket at the water’s edge, the other bucket by his side, drawing in the cigarette smoke as if it were the breath of life, releasing it to the still air in miserly ecstasy. Around him was the sharp scent of the burnished mint. Close by, two swans fished in the shallows, three dark cygnets by their side. Farther out, a whole stretch of water was alive and rippling with a moving shoal of perch. Elsewhere, except when it was ruffled by sudden summer gusts, the water was like glass. Across the lake, at Jamesie’s gate, a man had backed his tractor out into the lake and was fishing from the raised transport box, the engine running.

“Cecil Pierce, as sound a Protestant as ever walked, can drink pints as good as any Catholic,” Jamesie identified the man fishing from the transport box. “At your ease, Bill,” he whispered as they passed Bill Evans.

“Not doing too badly at all, Jamesie,” he answered.

“Give our love to Mary,” Kate said when Jamesie lifted his bicycle out of the ditch.

He paused and turned to bow low, “I never liked yous anyhow,” and cycled away.

The heron rose out of the reeds and flapped ahead as if leading him round the shore, but then swung high out over the lake to make its own way to that part of the shore where two round piers stood close to the water’s edge. Hidden in a wilderness of trees and crawling briars behind the piers were the ruins of the house where Mary had grown up and from where she crossed the lake to marry Jamesie.

When the Ruttledges turned the corner away from the lake they came on Bill Evans standing between his two buckets of water. He was not smoking. He had been waiting for them. They each lifted a bucket. Usually his slow, arthritic walk uphill from the lake entailed a stop every ten or twelve paces. Now, freed from weight, he easily kept pace, using the blackthorn vigorously to propel himself in a crab-like, sideways climb. They continued past their gate until he hissed, “Ye are far enough.”

“You’ll be ready for the dinner now?”

“I’ll be ready,” he grinned wolfishly.

“Will there be anything left?”

“Begod there will. There’ll be lots,” he said, but the sudden look of anxiety in the eyes belied the assertiveness.

Across the lake Jamesie was resting after climbing the steep hill away from the lake, he and his bicycle silhouetted against the sky. Cecil Pierce sat slumped in the raised transport box out over the water as if he had fallen asleep while holding the fishing rod, the engine of the tractor throbbing peacefully away.

“Bill Evans was the one person we met the first time we came in round the shore,” Ruttledge said.

“I remember the storm,” Kate said. “We were in the Shah’s car, following Jimmy Joe McKiernan’s battered little red Ford. The waves were washing across the lake wall, pouring down the windscreen, blinding the windows. The wildness could only be heard. The road was spattered with foam, the Shah shaking with laughter behind the wheel as the car rolled from rut to rut. ‘If it’s away from it all yous are trying to get, this royal avenue is as good as any moat.’ When he laughs like that you hardly hear a sound. He just sits and shakes like a huge ball of jelly. He believed it was all a wild goose chase.”

“We had spent the whole day looking at places. Empty houses, falling-down houses, one house on the mountain, its floor covered with rat traps, new bungalows full of children. Dreams in tatters with the ‘For Sale’ sign at the gate.”

“And the small children peering up at us from the floors. Where were they all to go?”

“To England. To the towns. A mother told me they’d buy a house in the town if they sold. Her husband had already a job in the cement factory. Jimmy Joe McKiernan hardly said a word all day. He’d mention a price or the acres of land or the family name.”

“Your uncle, the dear Shah, was silent as well. Once I said it would look better if one of us travelled with Jimmy Joe. ‘That’d be only mixing things up, Kate. Jimmy Joe is well used to being on his own,’ he laughed. I had no idea he was referring to the years in jail. ‘Jimmy Joe has as much interest in houses and lands as I have in the moon.’ ‘What interests him?’ I asked. ‘Freeing Ireland,’ was the answer. ‘But Ireland is free?’ ‘In Jimmy Joe’s book there’s a part that’s not free.’ ”