John McGahern - Amongst Women

Some of the anger at the death veered towards Michael as soon as he appeared in the hallway. Being left on the periphery of what was happening he had become bored and driven to town with his son. ‘You’re a nice gentleman. You couldn’t even manage to be in the house when Daddy was going.’ He did not realize at first what had taken place and put up his hands in jocose surrender to these fierce and impossible women but went very pale and still as soon as he understood that his father had just died. Gently Rose opened the door to the room and he nodded silently to her and went in. Then she took his son by the hand. The child and woman went from room to room until they had stopped each dock in the house and covered every mirror.

It was a blessing that so many practical things had to be quickly attended to. Word had to be sent to Woods to come and lay out the body. Whiskey and sherry and stout had to be bought for callers, sandwiches made, the priest and the doctor to be notified. Rose insisted on going herself to the undertakers. She looked at all the coffins in the showroom and picked the most expensive, a beautiful oak casket. A grave had to be dug. There was an argument between the girls over whether or not Luke should be notified. A telegram was sent but he neither replied nor came.

When Woods came to the house the Franciscan habit was taken from its hiding place. The door to the room was closed while he laid the body out. His Rosary beads were taken from the little black purse and twined through his fingers clasped together on the breast of the brown habit.

In ones and twos callers trickled to the stilled house all that evening. They murmured ‘Sorry’ as they shook hands with Rose and Michael and the three girls, blessed themselves as they entered the room, knelt by the foot of the bed to pray, and touched the dead hands or forehead in a gesture of leave- taking when they rose. They then sat on chairs by the bed and were offered whiskey or beer or wine or tea. Few of the callers had ever been in the house before and they looked about them with unabashed curiosity.

All through the night they kept vigil by his side. Time should have stopped with the clocks but instead it moved in a glazed dream of tiredness without their ticking insistence. Morning stole over the fields. The callers continued coming to the house throughout the day. At six the body would be taken to the church. As it drew closer to six the minutes seemed to race.

The hearse was coming, turning at the wooden gate. A row of cars had gathered out on the road. The empty coffin was taken in. The house was closed.

They all had to go into the room to look on him a last time. They would never see him in the world again but he was already gone from them. The coffin was then brought into the room and laid on chairs beside the bed. The room was closed. Someone started a Decade of the Rosary and it was taken up by those standing between the flowerbeds of the little lawn just outside the door. A cry sounded from within the house as the heavy closed coffin was edged slowly out of the room. The front door was opened. The coffin was carried to the open door of the hearse. The hearse crawled out to the iron gate and turned right under the yew. All that night the coffin would lie before the high altar, only a few feet away from where he had waited so impatiently for his best man the day he had married Rose.

It was a heartbreakingly lovely May evening when they returned from the church but they couldn’t bear to walk about among the trees in the light. They went round the house to let up the blinds one by one and then they made tea.

‘My hand feels as if it’s been through a wringer,’ Mona said.

‘Mine is no better. I thought the line would never end. Some of the hands were like shovels,’ Sheila said.

‘They like to give you a really good friendly healthy shake,’ Rose was the most in control, even now laughing her low, humorous laugh. ‘They feel you might think they didn’t mean it if it wasn’t a good hard friendly shake.’

‘The poor devils mean well,’ Michael said combatively but it was let go by.

More arrangements needed to be seen to. Sean and Sheila’s children were coming in the morning for the funeral. A discussion started as to where they would sleep if they decided to stay overnight. Sheila said before the conversation got properly under way that they would all definitely be going back after the funeral. They were all numb with tiredness but no one wanted to go to bed. They continued talking and making cups of tea as if they were afraid to let go of the day.

After morning High Mass they buried him in a new plot beneath a yew tree. The birds sang in their territories high in the branches of oak and ash and evergreen, and little wrens and robins flitted hither and thither along the low graveyard wall. The Plains were bathed in sunshine and in all the fields between the stone walls the unhoused cattle were grazing greedily on the early grass.

All through High Mass and the slow funeral a faded tricolour covered the coffin; and as the casket stood on the edge of the grave a little man in a brown felt hat, old and stiff enough to have fought with Fionn and Oisin came out of the crowd. With deep respect he removed his hat before folding the worn flag and with it he stepped back into the crowd. There was no firing party.

As the shining ornamented oak coffin was lowered with ropes, a whisper loud enough to cause heads to turn in the crowd was heard: ‘That man would have died to see so much money go down with him into the ground.’

Two local politicians who had vied with one another for prominence all through the funeral now fell back from the crowd as the prayers began. They walked away to the boundary wall and leaned together out over the stones in amiable conspiratorial camaraderie, sometimes turning their heads to look back to the crowd gathered about the grave in undisguised contempt.

Rose, surrounded by the girls, left the graveside. Michael stood a little way off with his son beside Sean Flynn and Mark O’Donoghue who had come all the way from London. Age had taken the Elvis look off Mark and except for his weathered face he could have been another civil servant like Sean. The men followed the bereaved women out of the graveyard at a hesitant, respectful distance, unsure of their place in the mourning.

But as the small tight group of stricken women slowly left the graveyard they seemed with every step to be gaining in strength. It was as if their first love and allegiance had been pledged uncompromisingly to this one house and man and that they knew that he had always been at the very living centre of all parts of their lives. Now not only had they never broken that pledge but they were renewing it for a second time with this other woman who had come in among them and married him. Their continual homecomings had been an affirmation of its unbroken presence, and now, as they left him under the yew, it was as if each of them in their different ways had become Daddy.

‘He may be gone home but he’ll always be with us,’ Maggie spoke for them all. ‘He’ll never leave us now.’

‘Poor Daddy,’ Rose echoed absently out of her own thoughts before waking and turning brightly towards the girls.

At the gate they paused firmly to wait for the men who lagged well behind on the path and were chatting and laughing pleasantly together, their children around them.

‘Will you look at the men. They’re more like a crowd of women,’ Sheila said, remarking on the slow frivolity of their pace. ‘The way Michael, the skit, is getting Sean and Mark to laugh you’d think they were coming from a dance.’

John McGahern was born in Dublin in 1934 and brought up in the Republic of Ireland. He trained to be a primary-school teacher before becoming a full-time writer, and later taught and travelled extensively. He lived in County Leitrim. The author of six highly acclaimed novels and four collections of short stories, he was the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including a Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship, the American-Irish Award, the Prix Etrangère Ecureuil and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Amongst Women , which won both the GPA and the Irish Times Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a four-part BBC television series. His work appeared in numerous anthologies and has been translated into many languages. In 2005, his autobiography, Memoir , won the South Bank Literature Award. John McGahern died in 2006.